[0:00]Hey lovely, welcome. You are here if you would like to learn more about how to develop a healthy relationship with food and all that that entails. So, what are the different areas that in my experience, someone needs to address, kind of in isolation, but also as a whole picture in order to move from binge eating, yo-yo dieting, food obsession, emotional eating, feeling out of control, to a normal and healthy relationship with food. And I'll summarize those for you. The first area is balancing the appetite, making sure that the physical appetite is balanced and appropriate for our body's needs. So, a lot of people don't do this, but dieting, restricting, ignoring appetite cues on both ends of the spectrum can actually lead to the physical appetite becoming unbalanced. And I've heard so often, I feel so much hungrier than other people, or I can't hear my appetite cues, I don't know when I'm hungry, I don't know when I'm satiated. And actually, the disordered eating and dieting itself can massively contribute to that. And of course, having a balanced appetite, which is appropriate for your body's needs, is a part of a healthy relationship with food. So, learning how to do that is one part. The second part is some appetite awareness training, if you like. So that's getting in touch with hunger and satiety cues and appetite cues. The appetite might be balanced from the first part, but that doesn't mean an awful lot if you can't hear your appetite cues, as it were. And again, there can be a lot of confusion around this, am I hungry enough to eat yet? Am I not hungry enough to eat? Should I stop eating? Am I satiated enough, etc. What does it even feel like? All of these kinds of things. And so being in touch with appetite cues doesn't give us a healthy relationship with food in isolation, but it's an important part. Don't have one without hearing appetite, cuz the third part is understanding your psychology around food, and that can seem like a daunting area. I'll give you an example of what I mean. So, someone that is binge eating may be completely unaware that the urge to binge is pretty much a creation of their own. They're creating the urge to binge, typically without even realizing it. And one small example of this is, and that's through thoughts. One through one small example of this is, have you ever planned a diet for the next day? Thought, I'm going to be really good and kind of really on track and everything's going to be amazing. I'm going to follow this plan perfectly, and I'm going to use this amount of weight starting from tomorrow. And that very idea of, I'm going to begin tomorrow and be most perfect on my plan, was the very instigator of you having a binge that evening. You might not have been aware of it happening, but it's very, very common. And so there a thought of, I'm going to go onto a diet, should we say tomorrow, instigated or at least contributed to the urge to binge that otherwise wouldn't have been there? That's one small example. Then there's other things like scarcity mindset, you know, wanting what we can't have, creating the urge to binge and unnecessary cravings and urges. Then there's things like checking out when a binge starts to occur, and checking out contributes to the binge unfolding. There's a lot that we do in our thinking that creates and drives the urge to binge, and unnecessary thoughts and preoccupation around food. And the really ironic thing is that when people are thinking certain things or having certain perspectives around food that are contributing to the urge to binge, they are actually having those thoughts and taking those perspectives because they believe that they are helpful. Hence they're being done intentionally. And that's really, really good news, because if they're being done intentionally and for a positive purpose, it means that once they are identified, then you can stop doing them basically and do something more helpful. Developing the mindset of someone with a healthy relationship with food, which again, isn't as daunting or unrealistic as it can sound on the tin. It's actually really tangible. That's really crucial to actually genuinely having a healthy relationship with food, so we have to take into account psychology. The next part is moving past emotional eating. And this I can kind of break up to summarize into understanding and identifying what types of emotional eating that you do. What do you use food for emotionally to meet needs or to meet emotions? Does food mean certain things to you? And the next part then is actually tending to those needs and getting those needs met, and working through emotions and responding to your emotions in really healthy and productive and self-developmental and resilient ways, sufficiently and effectively enough that the urge to use food emotionally in those ways goes down on its own.
[5:03]A lot of people make a mistake when it comes to emotional eating of just trying to not emotionally eat and just try to stop it using that force and willpower, which we've spoken about. But with a healthy relationship with food, we would consider that those urges to use food in unhelpful ways aren't there in the first place. And so we're looking at what can we do to bring the urges down, which is getting those needs and emotions met in more fulfilling and appropriate ways. The next area is body image, improving body image. So, if at the moment, a lot of what you think of yourself will feel or do or wear, or feel that you deserve to have is dependent on your body shape or size, then that's going to need to be addressed in my opinion and experience. Because if it's not, and there's a lot riding on what body weight or shape you have, then how could you not go in and start to control food? Even if you developed a healthy relationship with food, how could you maintain a healthy relationship with food, if, say, your confidence or your sense of style, or your feeling of being worthy or lovable, or having fun in life is dependent on your body? And it's absolutely possible, and something which I fully support, to have a healthy relationship with food that comes naturally to us, and care about health and fitness from a place of self-care and passion and enjoyment, and have good body image and feel good about ourselves, and be out there striving in our lives and feel confident regardless of what exactly our body shape is doing at that particular time. and improving the relationship with food and improving body image. These two, invariably they go hand in hand. It's like you want both of them or neither of them for the vast majority of us. Another area which is crucial for developing a healthy relationship if people don't often think about is identity. Essentially, who are you when you're not thinking about food all the time? You're not preoccupied with food all the time? Your energy and attention isn't going there, and it's also not going on your body and what it looks like. And your sense of self as well, is not dependent on your body weight or shape. I never used to do any work with identity at my own peril when I was working with clients a few years ago, and I very quickly learned that these questions really need to be asked. And that's for two reasons. The first is that I would work with clients to a healthy relationship, food and good body image, and then they would come back, or sorry, two of them came back with one specific problem. And that was I don't know who I am without my disordered eating and bad body image taking up all of my time and attention, essentially. And the second reason is that if we are adding these things in along the journey to our sense of self or interest, where our attention goes, what we want to focus on, and these things are being added in, then it actually does a wonderful job of crowding out the thoughts around food and weight themselves, which obviously is really helpful for gaining a healthy relationship with food and good body image. It all kind of works in tandem. Another area is confidence, self-worth, self-esteem, self-love, and kind of group those together, as it were. And that's a really important part of gaining a healthy relationship with food, because what is a healthy relationship with food, if not a continuous act of self-care? Essentially, if you are only able to make decisions that was self-caring and everything else was impossible, then in my opinion, you would essentially immediately then have a healthy relationship with food because you'd be tending to emotions and tending to needs and self-caring ways. You would be naturally finding this balance of flexibility and enjoyment in food, but nourishing your body. And I'm not sure what a healthy relationship with food without self-love grown would even look like, or if that would even be possible. That to me again would sound like the healthy relationship with food diet. I'm just enforcing all of these rules, new rules on myself, out of a place of judgment and guilt and shaming, etc. And confidence and self-worth. These are really important, because firstly for body image, you know, expanding out domains of self-worth so that not all of it is riding or not so much of it is riding on body weight and shape. That hopefully is intuitive to you. But also, I work with so many people in this area where a large part of the troubles with food and body image is coming from the seeking, the desperate need essentially of external validation, because they don't have that internal sense of confidence and stability and internal validation. And so they need it from the outside. Another important area is developing self-trust, which is not the same thing as being really disciplined or perfectionistic. How can we develop and maintain a healthy relationship with food which comes naturally to us if we don't trust ourselves? And you might argue, how can I develop trust with myself? What would that even look like when I'm constantly doing things that I don't want to be doing, that I think are unhelpful or not in line with a healthy relationship with food? And the short answer that I have for that is, you don't have to be perfect in order to build trust with yourself. What you can do is you can reflect on the things that don't go according to plan in a compassionate way, and you can continuously learn from these things so that you are favoring progress, a sense of progress over perfection. That's the short answer, but self-trust, really important part of a healthy relationship with food, in my experience. Another really important area when developing a healthy relationship with food is assertiveness training, applicable more to some rather than others. But assertiveness is essentially the recognition of our own wants and needs and feelings, and seeing them as valid and is equal to other peoples, and then being able to assert them in a in a polite, non-aggressive and non-passive way. So essentially, it's the path to being able to tend to our needs and get our needs met. And that is so important for building confidence, for building a sense of self-worth, and also for bringing down the urge to emotionally eat, which hopefully will make sense to you. And here you start to see how these things link in with each other. And that's the point that I keep making in isolation. All of these different areas, do they develop a healthy relationship with food? No, but together with there's links between them, yes, absolutely. Another important area in my experience is developing the ability to recognize our own beauty in all the different facets of what that means. For some of us, we have a very narrow range of what we consider to be beautiful. We also make the assumption that everyone else considers it in the same way. We also value physical attractiveness very, very highly to our disservice, robbing ourselves of the ability to recognize and appreciate our own beauty in all the different ways that that means. That's not going to be helpful for our confidence, our sense of self, our identity or body image, and therefore it's not going to be helpful for our relationship with food. And the last area which I'll leave you with, there are a few others, but I'll leave it here. The last area of developing a healthy relationship with food, in my experience, is addressing perfectionism, or black and white thinking and developing instead the ability to be flexible. Again, developing set more of a sense of self-worth and self-value and self-appreciation and developing self-efficacy, black and white thinking or reliance on rules or rigidity or perfectionism. As many of my clients will attest, I've got a few in my mind at the moment, who just move past perfectionism and black and white thinking. Those things are really hard to keep in place and develop a healthy relationship with food at the same time, because what is a healthy relationship with food, if not lots of flexibility in combination with self-care? And what is binge eating and going off the rails, if not a really good depiction of black and white thinking, that pendulum swinging, I might be in control or I'm out of control. When we're developing a healthy relationship with food, we've got to compartmentalize the different areas and address them all kind of separately, and then allow all of that to come together, but that goes far beyond the scope of this video. If you want to chat with me, or if you're interested in exploring working together and what that might look like, then I absolutely love hosting discovery calls with you. You can reach out, we can have a chat, and we can take it from there, and I can see how I can help. You find a link for being able to book in for discovery call with me down below, and maybe see you there.
