Do you have a positive, healthy food mindset? Or do you beat yourself up over what you eat? Do you judge others by their weight or how they look? Do your emotions affect how and what you eat? In this blog post, I’ll explain where the term “food mindset” comes from and give some examples of what it we need to work on being successful. So let’s get into it!

The Term Food Mindset

You may not be familiar with the term “food mindset.” It’s a term that isn’t widely used, but it refers to your overall thoughts and beliefs about food, eating and your body. Food mindset is the psychological and emotional state someone is in when they’re thinking about food or lifestyle.

It’s a topic that often gets overlooked by nutritionists, dieticians, and doctors. Many focus on what types of food we should eat or how much we should eat at one time. Many studies have shown that a food mindset can impact our overall health — it can affect our levels of physical activity and mental health.

Why is it Important?

Making lifestyle changes for some is not as simple as just making the changes. Mindset plays a large part in our success in outcomes of the changes we want to make. Lifestyle changes is about the mental components and the behavioral components.

Our mindsets help with motivation and inspiration. It’s what gets us moving our path to greatness. Majority of change must happen in our mind. The behavior part is simple, you just stop the behavior you want to change. It’s the mind that impedes the behavior part.

Working on our mindset not only helps with being successful in behavioral changes but also our relationship with food. Many of us learned unhealthy associations of food growing up or later in life. Our unhealthy relationship with food puts barriers in place when making lifestyle changes. Our food mindset helps us to have healthier outcomes with food and having an overall healthier benefit to our overall well-being.

4 Core Elements of Food Mindset

Thoughts and Thinking Patterns

It should be no surprise that the first one listed is dealing with our thoughts. Food mindset is deeply rooted in our thoughts. We must change the negative thoughts we have about ourselves, our bodies, and food. Majority of this work is learning new terms, doing self-work, and educating ourselves on food.

It is also important to identify our thinking patterns regarding food. Our thinking patterns tie to our beliefs which affect our emotions (we will get to this one in a minute). They also keep us stuck and sabotage our efforts in changing our mindset.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism can be the biggest downfall to mindset work. We get caught up in judgements and comparisons. It leads to us to undo stress and unrealistic expectations. Perfectionism creates feelings of failure and focuses on end goal rather than the journey and progress.

Emotion Work

Our thoughts affect our emotions. Our emotions also affect our thoughts. This is a vicious cycle which is why emotion work is an important aspect of mindset work. Sometimes we learned to cope with emotions with food which has led to binging behaviors. We must appropriately identify our emotions and cope with them.

Unlearning Old Mindsets

Our mindset is hard to overcome regarding food. Mostly because of what we learned early in life. Society and diet cultures have played a hand in old mindsets that need to be torn down. Sometimes, it’s about unlearning things taught by our families. They did they best they could with the information they had. Now it is our job to unlearn the toxic mindsets they taught us.

Diet Culture

For some of us, we grew up in the rooms of diet culture like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. Whether we were in the rooms with our mother because she didn’t have a babysitter or if she thought it would be a good idea for us to be there too, we found our way there even as an adult. These groups taught us that our value was defined by a number on a scale. So toxic!

There is so much to discuss on the toxic nature of the diet culture I will cover it in another blog. But it’s important to know how it impacts our food mindsets. It set the precedent for thoughts related to food and our bodies. Diet culture taught good vs bad which introduced us to shame. It put our worth as the number on the scale or the measuring tape. Those are only a few that affect the mindset, there’s more when you look at behaviors.

Society/Social Media

Societal pressures of beauty have been around for a long time. Beauty standards have changed over the years, but the constant was how other chose for us the concept of beauty. It’s displayed throughout time from newspapers to magazines to TV and film. Now entering the arena is social media.

Now matter the media, the message was the same. You should look this way and feel this way about your body. Guilt and shame are the cornerstone of the messages. They are the building blocks of our inner critic wreaking havoc on our self-esteem. The messages often reinforcing standards of the diet culture.

How to Change Food Mindset

We can easily do the food mindset through our own personal insights. Others may need more professional help. Coaches and therapists can help with mindset work. Coaches can be more hands on helping in your environment. Therapists work more on processing stuck points, addressing emotions, and helping to change thinking patterns.

If you are in Oklahoma, I am accepting new clients to help with their food mindsets. Click here for a free consultation.

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Disclaimer: This is in no way a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or substance abuse/mental health services. This is for educational purposes only and should be in used only in conjunction in working with a licensed mental health professional. Reading this blog or responding to it does not constitute a provider-patient relationship. If you are looking for a local mental health professional feel free to use the contact tab to request an appointment or search Mental Health Match, Therapy Den, or Psychology Today for local therapists in your area. If this is a mental health or substance abuse emergency and you need immediate assistance, please call 911, call 988, go to your local ER, visit your local detox center, or call 211 if you are in Oklahoma.

What is Food Mindset?