A destructive and obsessive relationship to food is never really about the food. Dieting, emotional eating, anxiety around food and weight has to do with food, but the reason why those destructive patterns are there, and the solution to move beyond them, is not about food.

I learned this from my own experience with food disorders and emotional eating.

I used to suffer from emotional eating and had an anxious relationship to food. It was so tiering, it felt like a prison of my own doing, and I didn’t know how to get out of the vicious circle of controlling what I ate, feeling guilty for not eating the “right thing” and continuously worrying about it.

I went from partially starving myself at times, to bulimic behaviour, to learning everything about healthy food and being militant with what I ate. Then became what I call a “healthy binger” – eating healthy but still binging on food, and after that to not giving a fuck at all and finally finding my own healthy balance.

From my experience I can say that when somebody have a destructive and obsessive relationship to food, this is a pointer to that something is not in balance within him/her, and that food is being used to cover up a pain that is too hard to look at. Like this, food becomes a distraction keeping us from going deeper. And when we keep using food as a cover up to what we feel, we are wasting our time because the reason why is never addressed properly and therefore the pattern never goes away and it keeps showing up…many times stronger and stronger.

It was only when I stopped focusing on food, and instead, made changes in how I was treating myself and how I lived my life, that my relationship to food changed and the negative pattern started to fade.

It was only when i accepted that there was nothing wrong with me that i started to heal. I was enough.

It was quite a long journey, with ups and downs, but by addressing all areas in my life where i was not feeling good, feeling stuck, unfulfilled or in lack, was a key to heal my long struggle with food.

I understood that I had been using food to try to control things that can’t be controlled, and that I used food to try to satisfy needs, that can’t be satisfied through food and eating.

So of course, there was a never-ending circle… I never managed to address what was really going on and I never managed to nurture myself with what I needed. Each time I ate emotionally, instead of feeling my emotions and learning from them, I realised I was wasting precious time and I was unconsciously postponing the life and health I so much wanted to live.

You can get free from emotional eating, anxiety around food and constant dieting. But the solution has nothing to do with food. You need to move beyond food and ask yourself what is really going on? What wants to be seen?

Starting there, respecting and listening to what show’s itself and adding in lots of patience and love, and you will soon see that your focus will no longer be on the food you eat, it will instead be on learning about yourself, growing and being excited about living a life of freedom and joy.

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