Think of a social event you attended. Maybe there was a picnic or a party. You saw friends, maybe played some games. There might have been a theme. Summer vibes, maybe. You wore a good outfit, and of course, there was food.
What’s a party without a heaping spread of refreshments, after all? Sounds like a good time, doesn’t it?
Now ask yourself: which part of that happy memory do you remember most vividly? If you answered, “the food,” well, you might be perfectly normal.
That’s only one memory, though. Think about a different experience–a different party, or a different social gathering. Imagine that you have an upcoming event. Don’t limit your thoughts to past experiences. Think about your plans.
In that instance, if the only part that you remember and care about was the food, that might be a real problem.
Obsessing over food is a problem. If that’s something you struggle with, it can affect your plans, your social life, and more broadly, your life at large. It will have a negative impact on how you spend every day. When you have a food obsession, it means more than thinking about food sometimes. It means thinking about food even when you’re not hungry, and thinking about food in moments with more immediate priorities.
There are ways to address a food obsession. If you need to know how to stop obsessing over food and weight, then read on.
How to Stop Obsessing over Food
How to Stop Obsessing Over Food and Weight
Ending food obsession means you need to improve your relationship with food. That’s a huge reset your body and mind need to undergo. The ability to accomplish this will depend on key factors like:
- Mental health and overall mindset
- Making positive changes to your habits
- Treating the psychological underpinnings that dictate your relationship with food.
Here’s where to start when figuring out how to stop excessively thinking about food when not hungry. Here are the steps you need to take:
1. Shift your beliefs around food, and transform your dominant emotions and feelings towards it.
This is the fundamental stage in ending a food obsession. Most of us suffer from a lifetime of subconscious conditioning, sabotaging our ability to easily develop healthy relationships with food. By developing unhealthy relationships with food, we develop unhealthy relationships with our bodies.
Being able to shift maladaptive beliefs surrounding food will lead to a transformed relationship with food, and in turn, a transformation in our relationship with our whole health. It takes time and it takes a shift in mindset, but with practice, it’s possible to fix your beliefs and change your eating habits. (HealthLine)
2. Learn how to enjoy all kinds of food freely, and intuitively eat the right portion with the right proportion.
This will help you stop second-guessing yourself and your dietary habit changes. One of the worst things any of us can do for a food obsession is allow ourselves to develop deep feelings of guilt over the food we eat. Psychology tells us that reinforcement of feelings of guilt tends to reinforce the behaviors we feel guilty about. (Greatist) In other words, feeling guilty is counterproductive and actually will strengthen rather than defeat food obsession.
In order to help you end your obsession with food, it’s important to learn how to enjoy eating. At first glance, it might sound like the wrong, even backward approach. But trust me, it’s important to make sure you stop feeling obsessively guilty about eating and enjoy your meals. Nevertheless, it’s still essential to train yourself into an intuitive eating pattern that makes it so you naturally eat healthily.
Our bodies are amazing, and they can tell us exactly what kinds of foods to eat and how much. However, we’ve gotten away from listening to them. In fact, people often don’t have any sense of their body’s cues. That’s why your body and mind need a reset. You essentially need to eradicate the bad programming you’ve learned about food so you can go back to being in touch with your body. That’s how nature intended it.
3. Remove your body’s biochemical patterns that reinforce obsession.
There are both psychological and physiological underpinnings contributing to food obsession. These biochemical factors have developed over a long time from living in a culture that encourages an unhealthy relationship with food.
It’s likely that if you have an unhealthy food obsession, there are complicated biochemical patterns that make it difficult for you to end the obsession. To truly end an unhealthy obsession with food, you will need to begin addressing the biochemical issues triggering the food obsession.
Addressing this issue requires an audit of everything contributing to your cravings and relationship with food. Additionally, a subsequent assessment of all of your behaviors is important. Adopting healthier habits surrounding eating and your health will help to combat food obsession. (CollegeNutritionist) These methods will change your body’s relationship with food and help you to stop eating uncontrollably.
That Snickers bar on the dresser will be able to sit there for days without being touched, without the need for willpower. If getting rid of food obsession is something you’d like to explore, book a 1:1 call here.
Leslie Chen has developed Lean Instinct Formula™ to food and nutrition to give you a new perspective on eating. You can end uncontrolled eating, food cravings when not hungry, and unhealthy obsessions with food, once and for all. If you want to address your uncontrolled cravings and your unhealthy relationship with food, book a clarity call.
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