What Is Your Relationship Status With Food?

You will have many different kinds of relationships throughout your life. Friends, intimate relationships, mentors, teachers, coaches. Every relationship will teach you something about you, about what you deserve, about what you desire. We can apply the same idea to our relationship with food.

You will not have just one kind of relationship with food throughout your life, you will have many. If you have been in a long term relationship before, that relationship transformed and evolved over time. It may have even felt like you had many different kinds of relationships with the same person the longer you two were together. The same thing will occur with your food.

The relationship you have now with food is not what it was or needed to be when you were a child or a growing teenager. As you have changed, your relationship status with food has changed as well. If you're currently navigating patterns of emotional eating, overeating, or binge eating, you're in a specific kind of relationship with food. We can take away any labels that this kind of relationship is "bad" or "wrong." That relationship has a purpose, even if it feels like an intense relationship to be in at times, it is here to teach you many things.

Some of the things your relationship with food might mirror back to you can include:

Your Boundaries

If you're always saying yes or always saying no to food, where else is this happening in your life? What were you taught about setting boundaries? How do you know when you want to make an embodied yes? How do you know somatically when you want to say no? Your relationship with food can start to reveal your patterns around boundaries and where you're being called to grow.

Your Sense of Safety

When you're feeling unsafe in your body, trying to control what, when, and how much you eat can provide a feeling of control which can often translate into feeling safe. Additionally, just the act of eating can feel calming and regulating. Exploring why you're reaching for food and being present with what foods you're desiring to reach for can start to guide you toward how your nervous system is operating on any day.

Your Beliefs

What foods you choose to eat can often reflect back to you your morals, your values, your perception about yourself and your body. Why and what you're choosing to eat can reveal what has been connected to your body image like your ability to be loved and accepted. When you choose certain foods to eat, get curious what beliefs arise that those foods are showing you what you believe about yourself, your body, and even the world around you.

Your Habitual Roles

Have you ever felt like a victim to your food? Or perhaps food has come in to try and rescue you. Maybe food has shown up as your persecutor. How you're relating with your food can show you certain roles you're perhaps playing out in your life. Maybe these roles are supporting you and maybe they're not. Having awareness of what roles you're playing out with your food, you get to notice if it feels like a familiar role you have played out elsewhere and if that role is a way of being you still resonate with.

Your Feelings

We can be feeling both physical and emotional hungers at the same time. Your emotional hungers can sometimes drive your decision making processes around food. This is where your relationship with food can mirror back to you what emotions might be present that are also needing your attention to be satiated just as much as your physical hungers. Patterns of choosing food to self soothe can provide you information around what your current relationship is like with your emotions.

Your relationship with food and what it is here to teach you is all right there on your plate.

How you're relating to food at any moment is revealing something to you about you. There is no right or wrong way to eat and every eating experience will be there to teach you about what is no longer feeling nourishing, grounding, safety producing, and regulating. When you make changes in your relationship with your food, this can start to trickle into other areas of your life.

To discover what your current relationship status is with food right now, you can go take my free What Is Your Relationship Status With Food Quiz at stephaniemara.com/foodrelationshipquiz. You will find out what your current food relationship status is and your food relationship red flags to let you know when it might be time to transition into a new relationship with your food.