How I Changed My Relationship with Food and Stopped Overeating

You eat all day because you can’t say no. Someone offers you something? You eat it. You had a long day? You deserve a treat. You’re bored? Might as well grab a snack.

Before you know it, you’ve eaten your way through the entire day and go to bed stuffed, dehydrated, and uncomfortable. Then you wake up wondering why you look so puffy and feel like shit.

And at some point, you have to stop calling this “self-care” and be honest with yourself: sometimes, it’s just overeating.

Figure Out Why You Overeat

No, seriously. The next time you catch yourself overeating, stop and ask yourself a few questions: What am I feeling right now? What happened before I started eating? Am I actually hungry, or am I eating because I’m bored, stressed, upset, celebrating, or just because the food is there?

Write down what you notice, especially if you keep overeating in the same situations. Look for patterns in your habits, your environment, your family or friend circle, and the way you cope with things. Sometimes overeating is a bonding experience we don’t realize we’re doing because it feels so normal.

But you can change. If you truly want to. I promise.

This kind of overeating can come from a number of things: trauma, low self-worth, emotional coping, learned habits, or even a food-scarcity mindset. And your reason for overeating may or may not have anything to do with your childhood or past. Sometimes we pick up habits and beliefs without even realizing where they came from.

And let’s be honest, if you’re stuffing yourself every chance you get, you’re probably not thinking about self-help or wanting to reflect on those big-back behaviors of yours. Truth be told, I didn’t either.

Stop Overfilling Your Plate & Stomach 

For the love of God and all things holy and great in this world, stop stuffing yourself to the point where you feel sick! Why are you hurting your body? It’s literally done nothing but keep you alive, and yet you keep putting it through that shit.

I did that for years.

I loved the taste of something, ate it until I felt sick, swore I would never do it again, and then repeated the entire cycle the next weekend.

And I know I’m not the only one!

If you haven’t realized what you’re doing yet, you’re not going to take accountability or do anything about it.

I got married, called it “happy weight,” gained 50 pounds, and said “But he still loves me.” That is a disgrace to myself, to my mindset, to all my goals, and to everything I worked for to get to the point where I was—all to flush it down the dirty drain just because I couldn’t control myself around some bomb-ass food.

Do the Mental Work

If you overfill and overeat, you need to do some self-reflection. Talk to someone, even ChatGPT, or use a journal to figure out what’s actually driving you to overeat. You have to understand what’s behind your behavior if you want to change it.

The 7 Levels of Why

One thing I like to do to get to the deeper reason behind an action or thought pattern is use something called the 7 Levels of Why.

Basically, you keep asking yourself “why?” and keep digging deeper with each answer until you get past the surface-level stuff like “I just like food.” That’s where you start getting to what’s actually driving the behavior. Let’s look at an example I did with ChatGPT and uncover why I ate not only my cookie, but my husband’s cookie too (true story!).

Why did you eat his cookie even though you already felt guilty about eating it? Because I knew he lowkey wanted it, even though he said he wasn’t really a fan of it.

Why did knowing that he probably wanted it make you eat it anyway? Well, because I probably liked it more, and it would have gone to waste if he actually didn’t end up eating it.

Why did the possibility of the cookie going to waste make you feel like you should eat it, instead of just letting it go to waste? Because the faster I eat something, the less time it has for going to waste… letting food go to waste isn’t good.

Why does letting food go to waste feel so wrong to you? I don’t know, I grew up being told not to waste my food and to eat it all, so it’s just ingrained in my head.

Okay that was only four “Why?” questions, but you get the idea. The more you ask “why?” the deeper you get into understanding what’s actually driving the behavior.

Cultivate Healthy Eating Habits 

Eating healthy is expensive, time-consuming, and hard to do… or so they want you to think!

I used to believe all of those things, too. I thought eating healthy meant spending more money at the grocery store, spending hours preparing food, and making my life more complicated than it needed to be. But once I actually started paying attention to what I was eating and how much I was eating, I realized it didn’t have to be that difficult.

You don’t need a fridge full of expensive health foods, a meal-prep kitchen, or your entire Sunday afternoon dedicated to cooking. You just need to make some adjustments and stop using those things as excuses.

Eating Healthy is Not Hard

Eating healthy and making better food choices for weight loss doesn’t have to be as difficult as you might think. You don’t need to completely overhaul your diet, cut out all your favorite foods, or start eating nothing but salads and protein shakes.

For me, one of the biggest changes was simply learning to eat less of what I was already eating. Instead of eating the entire portion I was served, I learned to take half—or even a quarter—of it and put the rest into a container for later. Then I’d eat the portion I left on my plate.

There. I just ate less than I normally would. And you can, too! Making small changes over time is the secret to making this a lifestyle.

Remember KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. LOL.

Eating Healthy is Not Expensive

Pull up your monthly credit card or bank statement and add up all the money you spent eating out last month versus what you spent grocery shopping.

You don’t need to find extra money for groceries. You’re simply taking some of the money you’re already spending on eating out and moving it over to your grocery budget.

For example, let’s say you normally spend $1,000 a month eating out and $300 on groceries. Instead of spending the full $1,000 eating out, take $500 of that money and use it for groceries. Now you’re spending $500 eating out and $800 on groceries.

You’re not spending more money. You’re just shifting some of your eating-out money towards groceries.

Then, as you get more comfortable eating at home, that $500 you’re spending on eating out could eventually drop even lower. Now you’re eating at home more often and spending less money on food overall.

I did this for my household and it was mind-boggling. I save so much money by going grocery shopping instead of eating out for every meal.

Eating Healthy is Not Time-Consuming

We all know the saying, “If he wanted to, he would.”

Well, if you wanted to, you would.

You would cut time from something else like scrolling on your phone, binging a new TV series, or going out to brunch. Maybe you have a couple hours one day a week. USE THAT.

Pick 2-3 easy-to-prep meals that you can rotate throughout the week for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Make your grocery list, do your shopping, and prep your meals during those few free hours. You don’t need a different meal for every day of the week (KISS!).

And yet somehow, “I don’t have time” is one of the most common reasons people give for why they can’t lose weight. But it’s not that you have less time. You have the same 24 hours as anyone else. You just have to decide what you’re going to spend that time doing.

Shocker.

You Have to Be Ready to Change

Changing your relationship with food isn’t going to happen overnight. You have to become aware of why you’re overeating. Stop overfilling yourself. Do the mental work. And start making better choices with food you already eat.

You don’t have to completely change your life or never eat your favorite foods again. You just have to be willing to recognize what isn’t working and start doing things differently.

For me, that meant learning when I was actually hungry, paying attention to how much I was eating, figuring out why I was overeating, and making healthier choices without making food miserable.

You have to be ready to change. And once you are, start. If you want to read more about mindset, here’s: How I Changed My Fat-Girl Mindset and Lost 50 lbs.

♡, S