How to Heal Your Relationship with Food - Notes on the Process

Photo by Ellieelien on Unsplash

If you’re overcoming a troubled relationship with food and you’re feeling frustrated or discouraged, there’s likely a disconnect between the expectations you have for yourself and the reality of the healing journey or what I call, “The Process”. If we don’t acknowledge and remedy this disconnect, and we don’t know that our rocky experience with The Process is to be expected, we might give up prematurely and walk away as if we’re doing something wrong. The antidote to shame and self-doubt inflicted by unrealistic expectations is to understand The Process, trust it, and learn to flow with it.

The purpose of this article is to highlight The Process as a tool itself for healing our relationship with food and to offer tips that normalize and help you navigate the often-contradictory feelings we experience along the way.

WHAT DOES THE PROCESS LOOK LIKE?

Cultivating a healthy relationship with food involves getting clear about what’s important to us, recognizing harmful beliefs and stories we carry with us, then establishing a new way of relating to food and ourselves. Then there’s The Process - the edgy internal topography; feeling inspired, then stuck, feeling hopeful with progress, then getting crushed by self-doubt and despair in a setback.

I’ve become both intimately familiar with, and healthfully detached from, The Process. I’ve observed her from many angles: as a client, partnering with my own coaches and therapists; as a student in formal training for mindfulness and wellness coaching (among other things); and as a Behavioral Food Therapist, supporting my clients. From each angle, I’ve experienced the sensation of riding a seesaw with hope or curiosity on one end and despair or inertia on the other. And I’ve discovered it’s when we surrender to The Process in motion, that we develop greater capacity for self-trust, hope, and resilience; that the pain of the healing journey transforms into something much softer and more malleable.

As a result, I’ve become very fond of The Process. But she’s quiet and understated, so I’ve also become her spokesperson. I feel it’s my responsibility to share my reverence for her with as many people as possible, so that when they too ride the seesaw they’re saddled with new perspective to help them tip towards hope and curiosity more often than not.

HOW TO NAVIGATE THE PROCESS

There are three aspects of The Process that, when honored, will anchor our sanity, perspective, and hope for our ability to heal our relationship with food: Give yourself time to start; Celebrate iterations; and Embrace productive despair.

GIVE YOURSELF TIME TO START

Starting anything new – whether it’s cutting out caffeine, beginning a writing project, or learning a new language – is an inherently messy process. We know it won’t be easy, yet we don’t allow it to be hard. So when it’s still hard in week 5 (or month 5!), we assume we’re doing it wrong and we lose hope.

Instead, what if we allowed for a longer runway to get going, without expectations? In our writing projects, we allow for and expect a shitty first draft, as many authors discuss. So why don’t we allow for a shitty first draft in our self-healing projects? The key to getting started is to get out of our head and experience by doing; to get curious, engage the senses in a new way, build up our tolerance for different, and to not expect to change habits or mindset yet. The only thing we should expect as we get started is to have withdrawal headaches, write crap words, and feel confused.

What we expect, we give mercy to. And when we bring a curious, playful attitude to a new experience, it eases tension, calms our nervous system, and allows us to access our creativity.

So, what does getting started look like when we set out to heal our relationship with food?

Assuming the role of a curious observer, then noting what we find interesting, without judgment.

For example, are you aware of how different foods make you feel? Journal about the foods you eat and the moods, mental clarity, and energy you experience that day. Do you notice you have rigid food rules? Identify what those rules are, then write their backstory: where do they come from, how are they keeping you safe, how are they hurting you.

CELEBRATE ITERATIONS

Why? Because life itself is an iterative process. Change is constant, and we are always adapting and recalibrating. Becoming mindful and intuitive in our food life (and broader life) is not a destination we reach. It’s a way of living; an iterative approach to self-kindness that evolves as our needs and lifestyle change over time.

For my clients, celebrating iterations looks like this: They observe the habits, routines and beliefs keeping them stuck. They explore new perspectives, tools, and strategies that help them relate to food, their emotions, and bodies differently. They experiment moving through their days in a more intentional manner; they engage in a different dialogue with themselves, loosen their grip on rigid food rules, test out non-food coping strategies. Some experiments work. Others feel scary and out of control. They stumble, doubt, step back, and recalibrate. Then they regain hope and try again, with fresh perspective.

That is what real progress looks like. It’s not a straight line forward, rather a windy, iterative process. We observe, experiment, stumble, pause, tweak, doubt, detour, then try again. There is no one right sequence or rhythm to iterations. Each pass lasts as long as it’s meant to before yielding to the next. But each pass brings new insight; a single thread of yarn that if we keep pulling on gently, eventually produces the full ball.

The Healing Process

Even as I write this article, I experience the power of iterations. As I’m editing, I realize this section does.not.work. It feels contrived – I don’t know how to say what I want to say. I’m stuck and frustrated. I begin to spiral into self-doubt, questioning why I’m writing at all. (Yes, catastrophizing is very bad.) I close my computer for the rest of the day and take Leila for a walk. In this white space and the quiet stillness of nature, phrases come to me. A few others come as I wake up the next morning. Single threads of yarn. I note them on my phone. After breakfast, I return to the page with fresh insight and begin again.

EMBRACE PRODUCTIVE DESPAIR

I experienced despair in the writing process I just described. And I tell my clients that despair has a purpose in our healing journey with food, too. It means we are using our critical thinking skills, questioning what we’ve believed to be true about self-worth and weight, or the foods we do and don’t allow ourselves. We’ve dismantled these lies and we’re left stranded, searching for a new identity now that following fad wellness trends, carrying around food guilt, counting calories and weighing ourselves is no longer our identity. To this I say, “Great! This is a good place to be!”. Before my client thinks I’ve gone mad, I go on to explain that it’s only when we release old, harmful stories that we can rewrite the narrative. Some refer to this uncomfortable transformation as ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’.

On Medium’s Apeiron blog, Joshua Press explains, “The dark night of the soul is a stage in personal development when a person undergoes a difficult and significant transition to a deeper perception of life and their place in it. This enhanced awareness is accompanied by a painful shedding of previous conceptual frameworks such as an identity, relationship, career, habit or belief system that previously allowed them to construct meaning in their life.”

If we don’t understand that despair can be a natural and useful part of healing, The Process – the emotional roller coaster – feels meaningless and out of place, as if it’s a roadblock we must find a way around. But as the philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, says “What stands in the way becomes the way.”

When we honor The Process, we recognize that stumbles, setbacks, and doubt are on the same path as progress. If a setback was destabilizing before, now we have the capacity to feel despair in its wake, while holding a quiet confidence that we can move through it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I had a mentor once tell me that we’re all in this Earth school. She said the purpose is not to reach the outcome because that’s when we die. The purpose is to work through the curriculum. We’re paying the tuition every day, with each breath we take. So, we might as well get something of value in return. This curriculum is The Process.

In moving through The Process, we come to recognize periods of confusion, self-doubt, and disappointment as signs that we’re showing up for ourselves. And when we realize that crazy seesaw has a rotating cast of conflicting characters riding together – hope and despair; excitement and disappointment; curiosity and inertia – we’re slower to assume something’s wrong with us. We stop viewing our life through the either/or lens - either success or failure – and start viewing it through the both/and lens - both progress and setbacks. And it’s through this more tolerant, inclusive, and compassionate lens that we see ourselves allowing The Process to run its course, calibrating to our complexity and contradictions, inviting more curiosity and creativity into our lives, and discovering what we’re really capable of.

If you’d like to discuss your own healing process, get in touch for a free 30 minute-consult.