Are You Obsessed with Food?

Wanna get more out of this post? Answer these questions before you read it.

What IS a “healthy relationship with food”? What does it mean to be “obsessed” with food?

Is health an important value to you? If so, how does that value manifest itself in your life?

On the surface, my boyfriend appears to have a “healthy” relationship to food. He mostly doesn’t think much about it and just eats what he wants when he wants, or when he’s confronted with food that looks good, or when someone offers him food.

I, on the other hand, spend a fair amount of time planning my meals, preparing them, and formulating strategies for dealing with upcoming situations that might derail me from my healthy eating.

But if you look just beneath the surface, below the broad shoulders and under the flattering black sweaters, you’ll find quite the belly. Yes, my beloved is overweight—20 to 40 pounds or so, in fact, depending on whom you ask (the scientific research or the general, overweight public).

Now, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from 50 years of nutritional and medical research, it’s this: what you put in your mouth matters, and it matters a lot. If this one utterance by an uncredentialed unknown like me doesn’t convince you, check out the bible of nutrient-rich eating, Eat to Live, laden with citations for your edification, or the website nutritionfacts.org, where even today’s cyber-depleted attention span can tolerate 4-minute videos highlighting current nutritional research.

Do thin people have to watch what they eat?

Every now and then, someone says to me, “You’re thin. You don’t have to watch what you

eat.” I don’t quite follow that logic, but anyway, I generally point out that, “I’m thin because I watch what I eat.”

In fact, when I used to eat what I wanted when I wanted (like the BF does), I was considerably heavier. And switching to a nutritarian diet, while it certainly helped eliminate uncontrollable cravings and my sugar addiction, has not eliminated my desire to eat recreationally. Once my taste buds adjusted to the less-stimulating flavors of unsalted, unoiled, and unsweetened fruits, veggies, beans, nuts, and seeds, my desire to eat just for pleasure returned.

Luckily I have lots of tricks and strategies for keeping a lid on my hunger drive, but they require that I think about food more often than, say, my boyfriend. Of course, those extra thoughts lend themselves to a considerably lower and healthier BMI.

“But I don’t want to become obsessive with food!” many a client has bemoaned.

“Well,” I ask them, “would you rather do some planning and implement prevention strategies or just continue eating whatever, whenever, guaranteeing you the same result?”

Adopting a healthful diet in our SAD (standard American diet) culture is not easy, and most of us will not be able to make the switch for good without some big changes. In other words, you’re not gonna just wake up one day and start choosing fruit and flax seed instead of donuts for breakfast and a homemade salad instead of Home Town Buffet for lunch.

How to eat healthy at a buffet

But what if your boss sends you to Home Town to meet a client or your high school junto has decided to reunite at the Buffet? Well, you could just show up and hope for the best, but that never really works, does it? That’s where the extra strategizing comes into play.

Here’s my strategy for buffet-type situations.

1. Make a huge salad with beans (no potato salad or bread sticks, etc.).

2. Eat it very slowly, putting my fork down between bites.

3. After finishing my salad, check my watch and wait 15 minutes. Then, if I still want that hot fudge brownie sundae, I can have it.

4. If I need to leave in 15 minutes, keep reminding myself how glad I’ll be when I walk outta there that I didn’t eat the sundae.

Does that sound crazy or obsessive? To me, what sounds crazy is bypass surgery, chemotherapy, and three-times-a-week dialysis treatments. If I have to do a little extra work to significantly increase my chances of avoiding that horribleness, so be it!

The Bottom Line

Eating a heart-healthy, vegetable-rich diet in a fast-food, pleasure-driven culture is difficult but not impossible. When you see your weight, cholesterol, triglycerides, and fasting blood sugar fall, you’ll be happy to seem a little “obsessed” with food!

Caroline’s 4-module Taste Bud Rehab Program helps people adopt a nutrient-rich diet by teaching them the psychology of permanent weight loss.