Unhealthy Relationship With Food
For many people, eating is both a pleasurable and rewarding experience that can temporarily take your mind away from your current situation. We have set meal times to eat throughout the day (breakfast, lunch or dinner) and sometimes small meals in between when we’re on the go (snacks).
This pattern of eating food frequently throughout the day is a fairly new concept, as humans in the past never had 100% access to their favorite foods/snacks. Food processing technology has become so advanced that more and more long shelf life junk food can be served up to the masses whenever they desire.
All of these factors is what is contributing to the steady growing metabolic disease problem that is growing rapidly in the world each passing year. By 2045, 1 out of 2 people will have diabetes and the shrinking quantity of medical professionals in the industry will not make this problem go away any faster.
The overconsumption of food is actually a real disease and a dangerous addiction that can spiral out of control without anyone noticing until it’s too late. Before you self-sabotage and ruin your health, you should identify if you have any bad habits concerning your relationship with food.
The Top 6 Signs You May Have a Food Addiction
Late Night Eating Close to Bedtime
Do you consistently have digestion problems after eating your last meal for the day? Experiencing heartburn, stomach bloating, nausea, insomnia, or frequent trips to the bathroom at night?
Eating large meals closer to bedtime is usually the culprit behind stomach and digestive problems and many people fail to understand this bad habit. Depending on what your dinner meal consists of, the macronutrients of food takes a particular amount of time to be broken down into nutrients and then later distributed and absorbed in the body’s cells. Certain macronutrients, like protein, takes more enzymes and spend longer time in the stomach to properly break the food down.
This habit eventually leads to weight gain as the food is being digested at a time when your body is ready to wind down and rest. The parasympathetic system activates hormones that signal food to be stored as fat since the body will not be needing those calories for any activity while at rest.
Impulse Eating Food/Unexpected Eating
Anyone leaving their home for any particular reason will eventually encounter restaurants, fast food chains, street vendor food, or random dining establishments that pique their interest at some point of the day. Remaining disciplined and resisting the urge to eat something you know you shouldn’t is another story altogether.
Falling victim to an occasional food urge isn’t the worse thing in the world, it just tends to be a habit that people feel guilty to admit quite often. When you habitually do this, you spend money on food you didn’t plan budget for and consume extra calories that aren’t part of your diet. The consequence to this lifestyle habit is yo-yo dieting, where you unexpectedly gain extra weight and have to spend extra months getting rid of the excess fat.
Eating More Than 50% in Processed Food
To have a nutritious meal, one would have to prepare a plate of food that came from animal and/or plant sources that were grown in nature. That means this meal would be have to prepared over one of many cooking methods or closest to their raw form to preserve the most vitamins and minerals (see How to Prepare a Nutritious Meal).
The habit for a majority of people living busy working lives is to buy their food from the fast food restaurants or frozen meals that can be made in minutes and prepared in a microwave. If you’re doing any of this, this is a food addiction that’s stemmed around convienence rather than for health. Processed foods are highly palatable and release more dopamine, which makes eating foods that are better for your body more of a challenge. Quick meals save time but cost you dearly if continued for too long.
Not Having A Weekly Meal Plan
Not having a plan is an automatic plan to fail in almost any sense. Sporadically eating when you like and whatever you like each week will result in disappointment when you look at yourself in the mirror or step on that dreaded bathroom scale.
Meal planning takes effort, commitment, and real work to organize meals that you can actually enjoy and gain the benefit of obtaining/maintaining your ideal physique. It also removes the guesswork of trying to find something to eat each day and leaves you with enough leeway play with the variety of foods you want to eat each week/month.
Constantly Eating Out At Restuarants
Unlike eating from home, restaurants are usually more enticing because they provide an atmosphere and service that many people feel is worth paying the extra money. It’s can really be worth the money if the food is actually good and worth coming back as a lifetime customer.
While regular restaurant dining is not the worse habit to have (especially when you have to travel often), dining out comes with the hidden cost of what’s being served with those ingredients. Do you know what kind of cooking oil was used to sautée, fry, or bake that dish that’s on your plate? How fresh were those ingredients?
Not only is frequent restaurant eating questionable but the proportion sizes are much larger than what would be prepared at home due to the profit margins of that establishment. The restaurant knows that higher prices have to justify the amount of food on each served plate, which means you may be eating more food than necessary because of the objective of the restaurant owners (see How to Use The Portion Sizing Method).
Drinking High Calorie Drinks Throughout The Day
It’s easy to consume 4-5 non-water beverages in the day and not realize how many extra calories were consumed without eating a single meal for the day. Starting your morning with coffee, tea, orange juice, or other drinks is normal for everyone, however rarely is the amount of drinks consumed in the day is rarely thought of by people as calories. Most beverages, including fruit juices, have way too many additional sugars for the volume of liquid that you’re consuming.
Consuming sugary beverages throughout the day can lead to higher blood glucose levels, eventually leading to insulin resistance in the body. Once an individual is insulin resistant, it’s much easier to become prediabetic and absorbing other nurtrients and minerals will become more difficult as well. This can affect the body long term in many ways.
Beating Food Addiction
People can become addicted to different varieties of food, however the mental relationship between yourself and food is what matters. Without identifying the mental aspect of your eating habits and just trying to find ‘healthier’ food options to consume, you will waste years trying to find the perfect diet for yourself (see Why Changing Your Diet is Irrelevant).
The mind is what determines our daily choices for the body and an unconditioned mind will always make more bad choices than good. An individual that opts for health as a priority will have to work on the mind consistently to keep making healthy choices without having to use sheer will power each day.
The first modality is fasting, as fasting is the temporary elimination of all food from the body to perform several functions that can only occur without the presence of food (see The Benefits of Intermittent Fasting). Fasting along with meditation produces a state of mindfulness that can create clarity and sense the emotions you’re experiencing without thinking about food.
Just the very act of not eating will produce different thoughts in the mind and thinking about food all day will eventually subside with practice and time. After introducing meditation and fasting, learning about the benefits of yoga will be another level of detachment that your mind has never experienced before. Stretching the body with various yoga movements can activate muscles in the body that are not used often, which is beneficial for deep relaxation or the removal of stress that induces unnecessary eating,
The Wrap Up
Eating for pleasure is what many people have grown accustomed to with the common times to eat each and every single day. Many of the food cues have become dangerous habits that causes one to self-sabotage without the individual realizing it until it’s too late many years later. By identifying bad lifestyle choices early on, you can prevent a health crisis and make sure that you’re in check with your fitness/health goals.
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