What A Positive Relationship With Food Looks Like

Developing a more positive relationship with food is such an important aspect of caring for your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.

A positive relationship with food is one where: 

• You feel confident in your food and nutrition choices.
• You nourish yourself in a way that supports your long-term, physical health.
• You are present at meal times so you can fully experience your food.
• You enjoy food for the sake of pure enjoyment.
• You have the mental clarity to allocate energy towards other facets of your life without food interrupting.
• You eat when you’re physically hungry, listen to satiety cues, and understand your non-physical hunger cues.
• You feel at ease with your eating habits and are consistent with the way you nourish yourself.

How To Build A Positive Relationship With Food

1. Nourish yourself with balanced meals – In order to have confidence in your food and nutrition choices, and eat in a way that allows you to feel satiated and energised, we need to know how to build nourishing, balanced meals. By building meals comprised of protein, carbohydrates, fat, and flavour factor, you’re able to eat with ease.
2. Balance eating for both nourishment AND enjoyment – The vast majority of diets and trends out there train you to believe that it’s one or the other. You either eat to nourish or eat for enjoyment. Because of this, people often find themselves in a start-and-stop cycle with an all-or-nothing mentality. A positive relationship with food is one where you can honour the many roles food plays in your life, including the vital nourishment it gives your body and also the joy and pleasure it can bring.
3. Don’t label foods as good or bad – Assigning morality to food like this causes imbalance. It causes a negative relationship with food. It welcomes feelings of guilt, pride, stress, anxiety, and compulsion to come into your relationship with food. A positive relationship with food no longer involves such feelings. It allows you to know that food is simply food. It’s either nourishment, enjoyment, or a combination of the two and empowers you to find the right balance based on your unique wants, needs, and preferences at any point in time.
4. Make intentional food choices to find the right balance – A positive relationship with food is one where we eat mindfully with intention rather than rigidity and rules. It means we check in with ourselves physically to tune into the body’s hunger and satiety cues to determine portion sizes. Where we eat when we physically feel the need to, rather than when we’re told to.
5. Don’t fall back to the safety of dieting – A positive relationship with food is a confident relationship with food — you know inherently that you’re doing what’s best for your body. The next biggest fad doesn’t have the ability to suck you in, make you believe that you must eat in this new way, otherwise you’re doing it all wrong.

Inside the RTH programs, we teach our members how to build their own, unique, positive relationships with food. We give them the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to nourish themselves confidently. Members are able to recalibrate their relationships with food to get out of the diet cycle for good and move forward with mindfulness and ease. Having a positive relationship with food is having power and autonomy over your life and your choices, which is a beautiful thing!