I invited Maryann Tomovich Jacobsen, MS, RD, to write a follow up to my October blog post, “Why demonizing food often defeats us.” My former post explained the psychological reasons why avoiding “bad” foods and using “shoulds” for eating often backfires. If you missed my initial post, to get the most benefit, scroll down and read the October 7, 2008 post before reading this one.

Maryann is experienced as a registered dietitian, and her eating philosophy is very much in line with my approach to exercise. Below she sheds light on her experiences helping women stop demonizing food.

5 Steps to Developing a Healthy Relationship with Food
By Maryann Tomovich Jacobsen, MS, RD

Most of my nutrition counseling sessions begin with confessions. One client says she was doing great until she started eating bread while another admits to sweets being her downfall.

Like many women, I engaged in the good food/bad food cycle for years. My twenties were all about restricting my naughty favorites followed by overeating them. But I eventually learned a lesson that changed me forever: allowing myself to eat any food I wanted made maintaining a healthy weight feel effortless! So I took my experiences, researched the topic and developed helpful strategies.

The 5 steps below will help you develop a healthy relationship with food, eat better and maybe even drop those extra pounds.

1. Think about the why

My clients usually think they overeat simply because they are weak human beings. Yet eating habits are not determined by character — instead, they are a learned behavior that starts very early in life. When you understand what’s really behind your eating habits you can stop beating yourself up and take real action.

While parents are well-intentioned, the feeding strategies they employ often encourage the good food/bad food cycle. For example, pressuring kids to eat their vegetables makes plant foods seem like a punishment. Using sweets as a reward makes sweets even more appealing. (Or they combine these two by forcing kids to finish their veggies in order to get dessert!). And encouraging kids to “clean their plates” or cut back on eating robs little ones of their natural ability to self regulate food.

Every person also has personal experiences and is inundated with popular diets, media stories and magazines telling them what foods are “good” and “bad.” As Michelle wrote in her piece, no one wants to do what they “should” do. That is why when women try to follow someone else’s rules of eating they become naturally defiant to it.

Think about your experiences with food growing up and how it has influenced your relationship with food.

2. Challenge ingrained food beliefs.

After understanding where your eating habits come from, you can take action by writing down the real triggers to eating: your thoughts about food. Once you capture the thought on paper, take the time to question it. If you find yourself thinking “That cookie is bad I shouldn’t eat it,” for example, write it down and challenge it by writing “Why are cookies bad? They taste good and eating one or two won’t cause weight gain.” You’ll also want to question the assumptions you make about foods you perceive as healthy or “good”. For example, if you find yourself thinking “this lunch is healthy so I’m going to eat more” come right back with “don’t all foods contain calories? Isn’t it a better strategy to eat when I’m hungry and stop when I start to feel full?”

Research shows that people overestimate the calories in foods they perceive as “bad” and underestimate the calories in foods they perceive as “good.” For example, a 2006 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that individuals ate 28% more M&Ms when they were labeled as “low fat” than when they were labeled as “regular.”

In a 2005 study published in Food Quality and Preference, subjects chose 3 slices of bacon (109 calories) as more weight-promoting than a large raisin bran muffin (460 calories). Even when calorie content was printed out for the subjects to see, people still judged the perceived “bad” food, like bacon, as more likely to cause them to gain weight than the higher calorie “good” food.

“Good” and “bad” food thinking gives too much power to individual foods and spurs the likelihood of overeating.

3. Make your favorite foods a priority

Now that you are changing your thinking, you’ll want to go against popular diet advice and make your favorite foods a priority. This can be a very hard thing to do, especially if you’ve learned not to trust yourself with eating. Write down your top 5 favorite foods (previously labeled “bad” foods) and make sure to eat at least one of those foods every day. At first you might eat quite a bit but after a while you’ll notice that a little goes a long way.

Still not convinced it’s acceptable to eat empty-calorie foods? For the first time ever the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2005) introduced the idea of “discretionary calories.” These are the extra calories one can use on whatever food they want as long as basic nutrition needs are met first – check it out (http://www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/discretionary_calories_amount_print.html )

Bottom line: When you know you can eat any food you want, anytime you want, your desire to overeat dissipates.

4. Combine the good-and-bad worlds

Now you’ll want to integrate your favorite foods with all the other foods out there. Instead of categorizing foods as “good” or “bad,” try focusing on the role each item plays. For example, some foods are great at nourishing your body (fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean meats) while others are simply for enjoyment (cookies, cake, ice cream, fried foods) and others are somewhere in between (pizza, hamburgers, mac-n-cheese, juice). The goal is to balance your intake of all these foods in a sensible way.

According to dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch authors of Intuitive Eating, http://www.intuitiveeating.com/ when their clients finally allow themselves to eat any food they want they eventually consume a diet that is 90% nutritious and 10% non-nutritious foods. I witness this type of behavior all the time with my 2-year old. She catches on quickly the food she thinks she can’t have. Once I give her the novel item, she eats a lot of it for a day or two until the excitement fades and then she’s back to eating a variety of foods.

5. Focus on the “how much” of eating.

According to the International Food Information Council, 6 out of 10 of Americans believe “what” they eat is more important for managing weight than “how much.” One area in which health professionals agree is too many calories result in weight gain – any type of calories. Yet a culture obsessed with “good” and “bad” foods encourages people to choose sides.

For example, I’ve worked with the elderly for years, many who are losing weight unintentionally. If we bought into culture’s idea of weight control, you’d think these people were eating only salads and fruit all day. Instead, they are given high calorie shakes, meat with gravy and rich desserts and they still lose weight – simply because they eat less food.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t pay attention to what you eat (that’s another topic entirely). But this idea that people have to eat only healthy food in order to lose/maintain weight creates a vicious cycle of getting on the wagon and falling off. But if women can learn to eat just the right amount that their bodies need, all the time, then they’ll be getting somewhere.

You can accomplish this feat by tuning into the amazing hunger signals you were born with but got lost along the way to adulthood. Eat according to your appetite, take time to enjoy each bite, eat satisfying food and stop when you start to feel full. After all, the best diet is the one created by you — always honoring your personal preferences. Yes, it’s really that easy.

Maryann Tomovich Jacobsen, MS, RD is the creator of RaiseHealthyEaters.com, a website/blog aimed at helping moms raise healthy and happy eaters while conquering their own food issues.