Does it feel like you’re obsessed with food because you think about it all the time?

If your brain feels like a never-ending scroll of food thoughts—what you ate, what you should eat, shouldn’t have eaten, what you’ll eat later—you’re not alone.

You might be wondering: Why can’t I just eat like a “normal” person and not think about it all the time?!

Here’s the thing: It’s not your fault. There is nothing wrong with you. We’ve been trained by Diet and Wellness Culture to micromanage food decisions with rules and restrictions that disconnect us from the one source of truth we actually can trust—our own body.

When you get out of your head and back into your body, it’s a game-changer. You’ll finally be able to make food choices with confidence and clarity. Imagine how freeing it would feel to focus on your life—not your lunch.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to quiet the constant chatter around food by sharing three steps that have helped countless women break this cycle and find peace. Ready? Let’s dive in.

The 3 R’s to Relax and Trust Yourself Around Food

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#1: Reconnect with Your Body’s Hunger and Fullness Cues

Let’s start here—because this is the foundation of everything.

Your body is incredibly wise. It’s not a passive vessel to be ignored or a ravenous monster that needs to be controlled.  It’s actually an intelligent being that wants to keep you alive and even thrive.  Your body knows what it needs.

Your body knows what it needs.

It has built-in, complex systems of chemical and neural feedback designed to monitor your energy needs and communicate with you. These systems assess things like how much energy you’ve used, how much you’ve taken in, and what nutrients might be needed. Then, they send you signals—through physical sensations, thoughts, and even moods—that say, “Hey, it’s time to eat” or “We’re full now, thanks.”

When you’re connected to these signals, eating becomes simple. The problem is, most of us have been taught to override these signals, and even distrust them.

How you became disconnected from your body’s wisdom

We learn this over time picking up subtle (and not so subtle) messages from our families, media and then explicitly in Diet and Wellness Culture, until our minds are filled with information, rules, and constant questioning.

The overriding message, especially for women, is that we can’t trust ourselves, we don’t know, and we need to follow external directions on when, what, and how much to eat—regardless of how we feel. 

Think about your upbringing – where did you learn to override your body in favor of following rules?  

It may have started with a concerned parent making a spoon into an airplane to entice you to eat a few more peas, a comment that “you can’t possibly still be hungry, we just ate dinner,” and then a prescribed diet when you were thought to be a little chubby.  

The internalized message: something is wrong with your body, it can’t be trusted.  And so, over time, you lose touch with being in communication with your body and knowing what the subtle cues of hunger and fullness even feel like.  

So it makes sense that without this body connection, your mind would be on overdrive and you would think you needed to rely on information and guidelines to monitor your food choices.  But what Diet and Wellness Culture doesn’t tell you, is that the very nature of the restrictive rules they prescribe to deal with your problematic body will actually create obsessive thoughts about food.  WHAT?!  

Let me break this down – your brain is wired to keep you alive.  When it perceives scarcity it turns on physiological and mental adaptations to ensure it can get the resources it needs to survive.  

This perceived scarcity might be restriction of actual calories or specific nutrients, unreliability of food, or just the idea that you shouldn’t be eating certain foods.  

And the physical and mental adaptations include things like: increased thoughts of food, hyper-vigilance and scanning of the environment for the foods that are perceived as scarce, and an increased drive to eat these foods when they are available.  

So if you are not listening and responding to your body’s hunger cues, your body is going to turn up the volume on all thoughts of food and create the compulsion to eat as much of those foods as possible when they are available.

The good news is you can rebuild your connection with your body by starting simply with listening and responding to hunger.  

Reconnect using the Eating Awareness Practice

The more familiar you become with these cues, the easier it is to catch hunger early, before it turns into ravenous urgency—when it’s hard to eat mindfully or stop at comfortable fullness.

When you listen for these hunger cues and respond, you create the reliable consistency that your body reads as being in a stable safe environment.

So, where do hunger cues show up? They can be felt throughout the body in different ways, including:

• Head: Thoughts of food or what time it is, difficulty concentrating, foggy thinking, headaches
• Throat: Dull ache, slight gnawing
• Stomach: Gurgling, emptiness, rumbling, hollow sensation
• Energy levels: Feeling sleepy, sluggish, apathetic, or numb
• Mood: Cranky, irritable, impatient, short-tempered, low motivation

This is where the Eating Awareness Practice comes in.

It’s a process I guide you through inside my Nourishing Vitality: Personalized Nutrition Counseling program, and it’s a powerful tool to help you:

• Tune into your hunger and fullness signals before and after meals
  
• Practice responding to your body’s needs instead of rules or schedules
  
• Build trust in yourself to eat in a way that feels good and grounded
  

By using the Eating Awareness Practice you’ll start identifying earlier signs of hunger (when it’s easier to think about what and how much you want to eat) and how fullness and satisfaction feel different.  The Eating Awareness Practice also guides you in being curious about the various factors involved in your food choices and build the skills to identify physical hunger from emotional hunger, giving you the ability to make conscious choices that meet your needs.  

This short-term journaling practice is NOT about tracking all your food, counting calories or track macros. It is a way to bring conscious awareness to the various aspects of your relationship with your body and food and unravel the reactionary habits so you can make simple choices in response to your needs. 

This is how we bring conscious body awareness back into the eating experience and quiet the mental chatter.

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#2: Reset Your Thinking—Change Judgments Into Observations

Now let’s directly address those loud, internal voices that have been plaguing you.  These voices are the sum of every food rule, diet, comment, or headline you’ve ever absorbed. 

Getting to Know the Voices in Your Head

They sound like a Food Police sounding the alarm about every miss step and the potential consequences and a goody two shoes Nutrition Informant going on and on about the the good and the bad, the healthy and the unhealthy.

• “I shouldn’t have eaten that bagel—carbs are so bad for you.”
• “I didn’t work out today, now I can’t have that treat.‘
• “I can’t be hungry—I just ate!”
• “I just ate so much!  I can’t be trusted with food.”

They speak in absolutes—must, should, always, never, bad, good, perfect. These voices are harsh, critical, and anxiety-inducing. They developed to keep you “safe” within the rules of Diet Culture, but they’re rooted in fear, and their real impact?  They keep you stuck in the same cycle.

The Cycle of feeling like something is wrong with you that needs to be fixed, looking for The Plan that is going to help you get back on track, and then eventually your inner rebel rises up and you fall off the plan and the guilt and shame kick in reinforcing the idea that something is wrong with you… (a.k.a. The Fix → Restrict → Rebel → Guilt Cycle).

That Rebel Voice is the one that pushes back against the policing critical voices.  It might sound like:

• “What the hell, I deserve this.”
• “I already had one cookie, might as well eat the whole box.”
• “You want me to restrict? Watch me do the opposite.”

It may feel like your inner Rebel is self-sabotage, but it’s just a natural reaction to restriction. It’s a part of you that rises up to reclaim your autonomy, your right to eat what you want, your right to decide for yourself.  Think of it like your inner teenager that’s saying to hell with the parental rules! I’m going to do the opposite of what you tell me to do just to show my independence.  

It’s also a part of that evolutionary design for survival – a healthy sign that your body and mind are working to keep you alive and thriving.  But while it has your best interest at heart, because it is a defiant reaction, it tends to swing hard in the opposite direction—so instead of eating in a way that nurtures your body, you often overdue it and eat in a way that doesn’t feel so great physically or emotionally. 

Suffice it to say, these battling voices aren’t helping you make simple, nourishing food choices – they are complicating things and creating guilt and anxiety instead of peace and freedom.  

So how do we move out of this inner tug-of-war?

How to Reset Your Thinking

We reset our thinking by learning to notice our food experiences without judgment. 

In doing this, we activate a new part of ourselves, a witnessing part that can neutralize the ideas we learned about food that are exhausting us and causing reactionary behaviors, and instead create an opening to make conscious choices in response to our body and our needs in the moment.

This looks like:  No condescending statements. No shame. Just facts and curiosity.

• I ate a bagel with cream cheese at 9:00am. 
• My body is telling me it is hungry.  
• I ate a piece of cake at the party. It tasted good.  A food policing thought made me feel guilty about it.  A half hour later, my body felt a little jittery and slightly hungry again.
• I skipped breakfast and was ravenous by 11AM.
• I was stressed and hungry when I got home from work.  I ate chicken stir fry for dinner and then I ate 10 cookies.

This part of you observes your experiences with neutrality. It doesn’t judge or try to fix—just notices what’s happening.

Resetting your thinking this way helps you pause and notice what’s going on beneath the surface. It allows you to start seeing patterns and triggers—without diving into judgment or spiraling into guilt.

Resetting your thinking this way helps you pause and notice what’s going on beneath the surface. It allows you to start seeing patterns and triggers—without diving into judgment or spiraling into guilt.

The next step is to create new ways of thinking about your food choices with simple, nurturing, trust building statements.  

• No matter what I ate, it’s ok.  Food is just food. 
• I’m learning to listen and respond to my body’s needs. 
• I don’t have to earn the right to eat by exercising.
• I choose to be kind to myself no matter what.
• It’s possible that I can trust my body to tell me what and how much to eat.

When you practice shifting away from the critical food policing and reset your thinking something beautiful happens: you feel safer in your own mind. And when that happens, food loses its power over you.

In Nourishing Vitality: Personalized Nutrition Counseling, we work together to identify the inner voices that are driving your eating habits and help you deconstruct the old thinking and reset your thinking through coaching conversation, journaling, and awareness practices. Over time, this new way of thinking helps you navigate eating with trust, ease, and self-compassion.

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#3: Reclaim Your Autonomy – Give Yourself Permission to Eat

PERMISSION?! Yes, really!

And trust me – this is the key to being able to relax around food AND nourish your body.

I get it, after years of following rules, plans, and protocols, it’s no wonder you hesitate to give yourself full permission to eat what you want. It feels risky. Maybe even dangerous.

But by now you are starting to see how restriction breeds obsession.

When you give yourself permission to have any food any time, the urgency disappears. You’re able to slow down and ask:

• What do I really want right now?
  
• What will feel good in my body—not just during, but after?
  
• What sounds satisfying? What’s available?
  

Permission gives you access to discernment. Because when there’s nothing to rebel against, you can actually choose from a place of grounded self-awareness.

This step is easy when it’s built on steps 1 and 2—when you’ve reconnected with your body’s cues and removed the judgment that keeps you stuck.

Inside Nourishing Vitality: Personalized Nutrition Counseling, I guide you through this process in real time—helping you explore what permission looks like, sounds like, and feels like in your daily life. We practice together, so that you’re not just learning to trust yourself, you’re actually experiencing what that trust feels like.

And the best part? That trust leads to freedom—not just around food, but in how you show up in your life.

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You Might Be Wondering…

“But if I stop following rules and allow myself to eat anything, won’t I just eat junk food all the time?”

That fear makes so much sense—especially if you’ve experienced letting go of the rules before, only to find yourself eating everything in sight and feeling worse afterward.

But here’s the difference with this approach: You’re not just ditching the rules and hoping for the best. You’re learning to reconnect with your body’s cues, to shift the mindset patterns that created that reactionary eating, and you’re making more conscious choices from a place of alignment with yourself – your needs, your desires, how you want to feel.  

With the right support and practices, you break free of The Fix → Restrict → Rebel → Guilt Cycle.  It is true liberation, not just another plan.  

Here’s how this looks in real life

One of my clients, Sarah, describes how her relationship with food transformed —especially when she was spending time with others.

“The inner battle about food and what I should or shouldn’t eat has greatly diminished.  Now I’m able to check in with my body and ask myself if I’m hungry, how hungry am I, and what I want to eat? It’s simple. I can trust my choices in any situation.”

“The inner battle about food and what I should or shouldn’t eat has greatly diminished.  Now I’m able to check in with my body and ask myself if I’m hungry, how hungry am I, and what I want to eat? It’s simple. I can trust my choices in any situation.”

– Sarah (Client)

Instead of trying to pre-plan, overthink, or “save up” for meals, Sarah now eats what her body needs when it needs it. And that has freed her up in more ways than she expected:

“I find that I’m more present with the people I’m with because my attention isn’t half on the food.  The guilty backlash that used to follow me after eating is also gone, so I’m able to have more fun with my family and have energy for the next thing in my day.”

She described that she’s now “making better choices with food,” not because of a specific food plan, but because permission around food has created the space for her to be in tune with herself and her body.   And even when she eats something that doesn’t sit quite right, she doesn’t go down a shame spiral.  She responds with non judgmental awareness and kindness:  

“My eating isn’t perfect, but that’s ok.  I realize that goal is what was causing my internal struggle.  Now I’m in conversation with my body and more forgiving if I eat something or an amount that doesn’t feel great.  I have more understanding about why that happened and can come back to being kind to myself.”  

This is what it looks like to break free from the food noise—and come home to trusting yourself.

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Let’s Wrap It Up

You’re not obsessed with food because you’re broken. You’re caught in a pattern created by disconnection, restriction, and diet culture messaging that taught you to ignore your body.

Here’s how to quiet the mental noise:

1. Reconnect with your body’s hunger and fullness
   
2. Reframe food judgments into neutral observations
   
3. Reclaim your autonomy by giving yourself full permission to eat
   

When you do these things, food loses its power to distract, confuse, or control you. Your choices start to feel simple. You stop second-guessing. You trust yourself.

You’ll have more energy for what matters most—whether that’s being fully present with your people, pursuing your goals, or just feeling at ease in your day.

Ready for Your Next Step?

Get the tools and personalized coaching through these steps in the Eating Behavior and Nutrition Assessment, the initial step in Nourishing Vitality: Personalized Nutrition Counseling Program. Together, we’ll uncover what’s fueling your food noise and give you the breakthrough you need to eat with peace, clarity, and confidence.

Book your session now and start your journey to food freedom that lasts.  Breakthrough guaranteed!