How I Overcame My Food Anxiety

Yes, it is possible to have a positive relationship with food, and most importantly trust yourself.

Not too long ago I wrote a blog about how I was able to separate my worth as a woman and my self-esteem from the number on the scale and my appearance. If you’d like to check it out here’s the link.

In this blog I wanted to focus on the actionable steps that I took in order to build a better relationship with food, which helped me overcome my food anxiety, as well as build a better relationship with myself and most importantly learn to trust myself and the choices that I’m making.

• Allowing myself free range of all foods.

Now I know this sounds really scary, especially if you’ve been eating in a restrictive way for a very long time. The truth is after I realized that my food anxiety was taking over my life (saying no to social events because of the food that might be there) it took years to be able to trust my own intuition again when it came to food. But taking this first step in allowing myself to eat all foods gave me the freedom that I needed in order to begin experimenting to find out what eating lifestyle best fit me, my physical needs, and my mental health.

If you feel like you have a hard time around social events or any event that may include food that you did not prepare or that is not part of your ‘diet’, I highly suggest giving this method a try to allow yourself room to find what type of eating style best fits your physical and perhaps more importantly your mental health.

• Tracking my macros (for a limited time).

I’m sure plenty of you have heard about IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) or flexible dieting. I came across this method of eating while trying to figure out a way to eat healthy but still be able to enjoy the foods that I love. To give you a quick run-down essentially tracking your macros is tracking your main 3 macro-nutrients — protein, fats and carbohydrates — if you track these numbers based on your approximate caloric and nutrient needs you can pretty much eat anything you want as long as these numbers are met. Figuring out your macros is something that I would suggest to do with someone who takes the time to understand your goals, needs, and lifestyle.

Personally I believe I made the mistake of not consulting with a professional about the appropriate macros I needed. I used calorie calculators online and researched what was an appropriate amount of protein and fats for women my age; that’s basically how I was able to figure out my approximate needs. I believe working with a professional would have been much more helpful because I would have had a guide in the process to help me meet my goals much faster. But in the end my goal was to be able to completely trust myself around food in any scenario, therefore my goal was only to track for a limited amount of time and I was fine in the end not consulting with an expert.

The reason why flexible dieting helped me in my journey is because it took away the fear of eating ‘bad’ foods. When you count your macros, as long as your protein, fats and carbohydrate goals for the day are met, the food source doesn’t really matter. For example, if I needed to eat a total of 150 grams of carbs for the day the sources I could chose from could be rice, bread, potatoes, cereal, etc. This really helped me in dispelling my fascination with what is typically labeled as ‘junk’ food, or food that’s ‘off-limits’. It allowed me to no longer obsess over the foods I told myself in the past I could not have.

• Changing my perspective of ‘I need to look good’ to ‘I need to feel my best’.

This mindset shift allowed me to change my focus from an aesthetic goal to a performance goal. When I started weightlifting and working out I did it because of how the fitness models I researched looked. My goals around fitness were pretty shallow and based on a extrinsic outcome. And so when I started working out pretty consistently but didn’t see the results that I wanted in just a few weeks or days I would get discouraged with myself. I eventually learned that having your goals be focused on an outside result, not an internal one, would lead me to give up in the long-run.

Instead of focusing on how I looked I turned my focus inward and focused on how I felt. I began to pay attention to my body in and outside of the gym to learn how I felt. I also took this perspective with food; I would take a few minutes to myself after eating to see how my body reacted and by trial and error I was able to identify the eating pattern and foods that best suit my body and make me feel my best.

I’m very happy to say that today I trust myself in any scenario that includes food. Since taking the time to learn what my body likes and doesn’t, I have been able to identify what amount of food and what kinds of foods allow me to feel my best. I may have a cookie here and there but I know one cookie is not going to change my body or affect my health overnight, and therefore it is okay to have it.

• Final thoughts

I believe food anxiety or being anxious around food is something that we all suffer with. Perhaps not always but definitely at some point in our lives. We have grown up in a society that has very clear beauty standards and definitions as to what is considered attractive, and therefore what is not. The one good thing I can find in all of that nonsense is the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle, however the point we miss is that healthy has a lot of shapes and sizes. Since we’re taught to focus on our looks instead of what’s truly going on inside we begin taking up unhealthy patterns, not just in our physical diet but our mental diet.

When I begun this journey of healing I underestimated the amount of work I needed to do for my mental health. The truth is all healing starts from within. I needed to accept that perhaps I may never look like a fitness model, but that should not discourage me from making good decisions for myself and my health overall.

I encourage you to do the same. Looking a certain way isn’t going to bring you the satisfaction and happiness you think it might, mainly because beauty standards change all the time and pursuing an external goal will only leave us running a race that can never be won. Instead shift the focus to inside of you. What makes you feel your best? What allows you to be the healthiest version of you? What habits make you feel better?

Let me know what you think in the comments section or if you prefer to email me directly please do so at [email protected]. I would love to hear your thoughts, stories and answer any questions you may have.