How Is Your Relationship With Food?

Healthy or Unhealthy

Does your relationship with food enrich your life?

Does good food add to your enjoyment of life?

Or, does your relationship with food leave you feeling like a guilty, deprived, dieting failure? If so, you may have an unhealthy relationship with food.

I realized I had an unhealthy relationship with food when I first met my future in-laws. My husband is British and I’m American. My husband and I joined his parents one weekend in the New Forest, an idyllic spot in the U.K. full of thatched-roof cottages and wild ponies.

After our first dinner together we sat around the table chatting. Out came the dessert and then the coffee and then a box of chocolates to finish off the meal and finally, some more wine.

As an ‘always-on-the-go’ American with a mom who didn’t enjoy cooking and who was just as ‘on-the-go’ as I was, I didn’t grow up sitting around the dinner table after meals. We ate quickly and moved onto the next activity.

Now, here I was sitting at the dinner table nearly 2 HOURS after finishing my meal. I was restless. I couldn’t sit still. So, I ate. I had second helpings of dinner. Then, I polished off my dessert. Finally, I popped chocolates continuously into my mouth for the entire rest of the two hours.

I couldn’t stop eating even though I was full. I thought about the food in front of me, even more, when I tried not to eat it.

Thinking about it later, I realized I had an unhealthy relationship with food. I didn’t cook much in my 20’s (I had better things to do). My friends and I went out most evenings. Food was cheap and easy and happy hour was social.

Not only that but in Southern California, I was surrounded by extremes.

On the one side, it was friends following the latest diet crazes and fitness fanatics with 6-pack abs and zero body fat and on the other, were the women who still couldn’t shed the freshman 15 and instead saw the number on the scale steadily rising.

Of course, I wanted to be in the 6-pack ab group. I believed that if I could somehow stick to the latest diet, I would be happy.

Except that I had absolutely no self-control. I couldn’t stick with a strict eating regime for more than a day. I liked food too much and realized that I needed to eat regularly or else I would turn into a miserable shrew. I was a dieting failure.

In hindsight, my failure to adhere to a strict eating program was actually a good thing. I never became a yo-yo dieter. I couldn’t do it. Although I never had Janet Jackson’s 6-pack abs (back in the day), I also never experienced extreme weight gain (or loss).