Your Relationship With Food

Many women ask me about our coaching, "It's going to help me have a healthy relationship with food, right?"  I am always taken aback by how to respond to that.  Relationship with food?  I know what they mean, but that phrase never sits right with me. I implore you to really stop and think about what those words imply, and how that implication can be a stumbling block in your process.

A "relationship with food" doesn't exist.  Food is a resource that either gets consumed or goes stale.  There is no relationship that exists - it doesn't care how you feel or what you think; food has no feelings or thoughts.  Relationships, by definition, only exist when there is an involvement and/or emotional connection between two people.  If you feel you have an emotional connection to food, we get that.  But that is not any kind of relationship, because trust us, food has no emotional connection to you.  If it were any kind of relationship, it could only be compared to that of unrequited love, a one-way relationship.  And so, if you want to say you have this relationship, it's a pretty lonely one.  To imply this "relationship with food" within yourself is a stumbling block in my opinion, because it's not being honest with yourself.  Food couldn't care less about you.  Food doesn't know you even exist.  If you want to call it a relationship, then I would say, "Get out now!"

The truth is food is not relational, and the only thing you are really dealing with in this process of weight loss is the decisions you make in consuming food.  For this decision-making, the relationship The Losing Coach® focuses on is the relationship with yourself.  You do have the ability to have an emotional connection and involvement with yourself, to care about yourself, about what you think and what you feel. This relationship is vital.  This relationship will help you lose weight.  Your relationship is with yourself, not food.  Get out of that "relationship" now, because it doesn't exist.  You, however, do.

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