Foodies with Food Issues

By definition, foodies love food – studying recipes and restaurants, shopping for rare ingredients, and spending hours cooking and eating. The paradox is that many foodies also engage in unhealthy behaviors such as over-exercising and food restriction because diet culture tells us pleasure comes with a price.

Author of Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating, Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, describes how eating too little took away her ability to concentrate at work because her brain was starved of the energy it needed to function. She writes of this same era, “I spent all my time outside work researching restaurants, going on “food adventures” … and having epic binges that inadvertently gave my body all the food it was missing --- and then overexercising to “make-up” for my failure to “eat right.”

One foodie who’s worked in Bay Area restaurants and food product development told me that he mostly lived on only two low-calorie, low-fat foods one year because he was so concerned about controlling his weight.

So, how do we honor the pleasure food gives us when diet culture says that food is the enemy?

One way is to start to question our beliefs.

Belief: A foodie regularly tells themselves that because a particular dish or restaurant is so special, it’s okay to eat beyond feeling comfortable.

Helpful Information: Repeatedly eating to a point of physical discomfort also messes with our brains. We are likely to punish ourselves by restricting, which ultimately leads to a binge, and around and around we go.  

Belief: A foodie believes they have to restrict food whenever they’re not eating something “indulgent” or “special.”

Helpful Information: When we restrict food and ignore our biological hunger, we starve our bodies and our brains. This makes being present with other people, including our kids if you’re a parent, more challenging,  and concentrating on our work very difficult.

Belief: Eating “healthy” food gives us permission to eat “unhealthy” food.

Helpful Information: When we take away moralizing terms around food such as “good” and “bad” and “healthy” and “unhealthy,” we take away the power from those foods.

Instead of judging ourselves for food choices we make, we become more attuned to our bodies. Not only does our self-compassion grow, but our compassion for others grows too – AMAZING!