How to Build a Healthy Relationship With Food

July 02, 2025

There are about 14 million estimated eating disorders among people worldwide. Still, it's far more people with complex relationships with food. One need not have an eating disorder to feel that he or she could oveeat due to failure to understand when a person is full, or that a person could be too obsessed with the number of calories-he or she could even be so obsessed with the number of calories the primary factor in the product selection process. How to build a healthy relationship with food is an essential concept to consider, as such a diet plan can also eventually become a full-scale approach in due course.

We explain what psychologists would suggest one to build a good connection with food. Most diets suggest to eliminate a particular selection of foods in order to reduce weight. People used to accuse everything on lipids in a prior era, then on carbs, especially fast carbohydrates like sugar. Still, to classify food as good or bad might lead to orthorexia and eating problems. An extreme obsession to the diet deemed healthy under some criteria is known as orthorexia. People with orthorexia may not touch some meals on the ground since they are not good or clean to handle.

How to Improve Your Relationship with Food: 4 Tips from Psychologists

Since the name orthorexia and the idea of such kind of eating behavior are introduced quite lately, in 1996, the official classification of disorders still lacks such diagnosis. Starting to embrace the so-called vilified foods, including starchy vegetables ( potatoes, peas, squash), the Canadian Guide to Healthy dining is modeled on a healthy dining plate. With a quarter used for other types of protein, vegetables and fruits occupy most of the plate. The remainder of it went to the carbohydrates, including bread and pasta, which most diets advise against.

Regarding sugar, salt, and saturated fats, the advice does not suggest eliminating them but rather reducing their quantities. Such is one of the signs of a good relationship with food, not to be sidetracked by the damage a certain product may do, to give yourself a chocolate bar and not feel bad about it in case you wish to eat it. The World Health Organization also emphasizes on cutting sugar intake to 5-10 percent of the whole diet rather than on totally avoiding it. For an adult, this works out to be 2550 grams of sugar daily or 36 teaspoons.

Don't give up food groups completely

This amount includes sugar in honey, fruit syrups, and other sweet items as well as plain white sugar—the one used in tea or sweets. Furthermore, the WHO experts point out that there is no data regarding the health consequences of a state when the daily sugar intake is less than five percent. According to the American Psychological Association, 38 percent of people relate their overindulgence to stress. First view seems to be contradictory here. Conversely, stress is probably the reason behind the appetite loss.

The stress hormone (adrenaline and cortisol) makes the body ready to meet the threat; the need to eat a meal comes second; and some people describe a lump in the throat as engulfing. That is the mechanism underlying temporary stress. For most people, though, stress is constant and this has another effect. Cortisol produced by adrenal glands has long-term effects that already influence hunger. Furthermore particularly the meal high in calories—that is, with lots of fats and carbohydrates—fast food and sweets included.

Learn new ways to cope with stress

Harvard Medical Research Institute scientists have found how such desires manifest themselves at the brain level. They looked at the function of a little section of the brain called the lateral habenula in mice in order to achieve this. Under normal conditions, this is the part of the brain that quell any need for rewards when we are full. On the other hand, constant stress reduces the activity of the lateral habenula. This will cause the brain to indicate rewarding even once we have eaten food, which causes over eating.

One can exercise tension by eating it away occasionally. Regular occurrence of this is problematic since people lack anything else in their psychological toolkit for handling stress. Emotional overeating, in turn, not only compromises physical health but also, based on studies, makes one feel a lot of guilt. That is to say, their stress is intensified more and they keep breaking once after another. These are some ways to control stress without resorting to overindulgence. Meditating. Breathing suggests shallow and rapid when one is stressed.

Conclusion

Reducing the pulse rate during meditation or just by doing deep breathing exercises helps to lower the physiological reaction to stress. It also helps one to eliminate the approach to emotions and concentrate on the physiological state in the current moment, control of the want to consume anything in the here and now. The content on social media, not the length of time spent on, is mostly responsible for eating behavior. Analogous effects of weight reduction content include overconsumption and laxative use as well as a fear of negative body appraisal by other people.

This is what American researchers came to find in their 2023 paper. With basically the same age and body mass index, the researchers compared the two sets of undergraduate students—2015 and 2022. Students answered the Body Appreciation Scale (BAS) and Fear of Negative Appearance Evaluation Scale (FNAES). Regarding the diagnosis of eating disorders, special questionnaire EDE-Q was applied. Of the 100 participants in the 2022 group, 64 clearly started spending more time on social media than in the 2015 group. The cause is one of the COVID-19 pandemics.

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