When people hear that I lost 140 pounds and have kept it off for more than a decade, they often assume I finally found a diet that worked. I didn’t. I learned how to eat healthy food and stopped eating unhealthy food. But that’s only part of the story.
I did change what I ate. I stopped eating many of the processed and ultra-processed foods that had filled my grocery cart, kitchen, and body for years. I learned to read ingredient labels, began cooking differently, and built my meals around fresh, whole food.
Those changes mattered. Big time. They improved my health, my weight, my energy, my body, and the way I felt mentally. But over time, I found myself confronting an uncomfortable truth. Yes, I had changed what I ate, but I had not addressed my relationship with food. I had simply found healthier foods to attach some of the same behaviors to. Because it turns out I can get carried away with kimchi and broccoli too.
The health consequences are clearly not the same. Eating a large amount of broccoli is not nutritionally equivalent to bingeing on highly processed food. I am not about to pretend a bowl of vegetables and a bag of chemically engineered snack food have the same effect on the body. They most certainly do not. But, I also discovered that changing the nutritional quality of the food does not automatically change the behavior underneath it.
The Food Can Change While the Pattern Stays
For years, food was much more than nourishment for me. It was comfort, entertainment, reward, distraction, celebration, and something to do. I ate when I was happy, sad, stressed, bored, lonely, frustrated, or simply because food was nearby.
When I began eating healthier, many of the foods changed, but I was still me. I still had the habits, emotional associations, impulses, and learned behaviors I had carried for years.
Sometimes I still wanted more after my body had received enough. Sometimes I ate because the food tasted good and I wanted to keep experiencing it, not because I was physically hungry. Sometimes the familiar urge to reach for food appeared even when the food in front of me was fermented cabbage instead of cookies.
That raises a question I do not think we discuss enough in the healthy-eating world: Is the goal only to eat better food, or should we also pay attention to how and why we are eating it? For me, the answer became both.
Eating Better Definitely Matters
I do not want to minimize the enormous difference changing my food made. Moving away from processed and ultra-processed products and toward fresh, whole foods was one of the most important things I did for my health.
If someone replaces a nightly bowl of ice cream with fruit, that matters. If reaching for carrots instead of chips helps someone move away from processed snacks, that matters. If a person going through a difficult transition eats more whole food than their body technically needs for a while, that may still be an enormous improvement over where they started.
Sometimes moving an old behavior toward a healthier choice can be a useful bridge. The body receives more nourishment, fewer harmful ingredients, and a chance to stabilize while the deeper work catches up.
But healthier food can also make it easier to avoid looking at the behavior. We can tell ourselves everything is fine because the ingredients are clean, organic, fermented, sprouted, or grass-fed. The label on the food may have changed. The feeling of being unable to stop may not have.
I Still Consider Myself a Food Addict
I do not believe I overcame food addiction in the sense that it vanished and could never return. I still consider myself a food addict, even though food no longer controls my life the way it once did. I have learned to understand the addiction, respect it—yes, really—and work around it.
Respecting it means I do not pretend I can repeatedly cross certain hard lines without consequences. I know what happens when I bring particular foods into my house. I know what happens when I tell myself I will have just a little. I know the difference between a choice that feels flexible and one that opens a door I may have trouble closing.
Those are my hard lines—the lines I refuse to cross because I know what happens in my head when I do. A healthier relationship with food did not mean proving I could eat every food in moderation. It meant becoming honest enough to stop placing myself in situations where experience had already shown me what would happen.
There is no trophy for keeping a trigger food in my kitchen just to prove I can resist it. There is also no prize for crossing a hard line and then acting surprised when I end up exactly where that line has taken me before. Knowing my limits is not the same as living in fear of food. It is knowledge I earned by paying attention.
The Medical Crisis That Made Me Look Deeper
A life-threatening medical crisis forced me to look in the mirror and ask, “How did this happen to me?” I never found one simple answer, but the crisis became the catalyst that made me reevaluate my entire life, including my relationship with food.
Until then, I had spent plenty of time looking at the food. What was I eating? How much was I eating? What should I stop eating? What diet should I try next? The crisis forced me to look at my actual relationship with food instead of only looking at the food itself.
That distinction changed everything. I began seeing the habits, emotions, family influences, beliefs, and choices beneath what was happening on my plate. I started asking why food had been given so many jobs in my life and why I kept expecting it to do things it was never capable of doing.
Some of those beliefs had been with me for years. Food meant comfort, reward, love, celebration, and connection. Cleaning my plate was what I was supposed to do, and having more demonstrated that I really enjoyed the meal. Dieting meant following rules until a “cheat” day gave me permission to abandon them. I had also come to believe that wanting food was reason enough to eat it and that feeling uncomfortable—whether I was bored, sad, stressed, or lonely—was something food could help fix.
Those beliefs did not disappear simply because the food on my plate became healthier. Changing the ingredients was necessary. Looking beneath them was where the deeper change began.
What Fasting Showed Me
Because I began fasting after I had lost half of my body weight, not as a weight loss tool, but because of the many ways it can support the body. But I discovered another benefit I had not expected. Fasting became one of the tools that helped me see the difference between food and the impulse to eat it. When food was temporarily removed from my usual routine, I began noticing how automatically I responded to it. Weird, right?
On a non-fasting day, I would walk through the kitchen, see something appealing, notice the time, feel bored or restless, or simply remember that food existed—and eat. But when I knew I was fasting, that automatic response was interrupted. The space between thinking about food and not eating it helped me recognize that wanting to eat and needing to eat were not always the same thing.
Sometimes I was physically hungry. Sometimes I was following a routine, reacting to stress, seeking stimulation, or responding to a cue I had repeated so many times that it felt like hunger. I had answered all of those signals with food for years without stopping to ask what they meant.
Fasting also taught me that hunger was not automatically an emergency. It could get my attention, change in intensity, and most of the time, pass. That did not mean ignoring my body or proving how long I could go without eating. It meant learning to pause long enough to understand what my body was communicating before automatically responding with food.
Fasting will not be the right tool for everyone, and it probably isn’t a stead-fast cure for food addiction. But for me, intentionally spending some time without food helped me see my behavior around food more clearly.
How Do You Know Whether the Behavior Matters?
This is where the answer becomes very personal. And there is no shame here. This is about coming clean with yourself. Eating more of a healthy food is not automatically a problem. Appetites change. Taste buds change. Bodies need different amounts of food at different times. A satisfying meal is meant to be enjoyed, and eating should not require a full psychological evaluation every time we pick up a fork.
But I discovered that the behavior deserved a closer look when I repeatedly ignored fullness, felt unable to stop, used food to change my emotional state, became preoccupied with getting more, or continued eating even when my body was uncomfortably full.
The question is not simply, “Is this food healthy?” The more revealing question is: Why am I really reaching for this food? Am I physically hungry, or am I __________? Bored? Sad? Angry? Lonely? Stressed? Tired? Anxious? Excited? Overwhelmed? You fill in the blank.
Then I can ask what I am hoping the food will do for me. How will my body feel if I eat it? How will my mind feel afterward? Can I stop when I have had enough, or does stopping feel like something is being taken away from me? Those answers tell me more about my relationship with food than the nutritional label alone ever could.
So What Is the Fix?
I wish I could give you one answer, but there was no single fix for me. I still use many of these tools today to keep myself in check.
I changed my environment so I was not constantly surrounded by foods that triggered me. I stopped bringing my hard-line foods into my house and pretending I would resist them when experience had already shown me otherwise. Sometimes I simply changed rooms so I was no longer sitting in one of the places where I habitually ate.
I also learned to create a pause. I might drink a full 16-ounce glass of water and wait 15 minutes before putting food into my body. I might walk my dog, spend 10 minutes on my rebounder, meditate, write in my journal, call a friend, play with my dog, or take a nap.
None of those things were a magic fix. They simply gave me enough space to determine whether my body needed food or whether I was asking food to provide rest, movement, connection, comfort, stress relief, or simply something interesting to do.
Most importantly, I stopped expecting willpower to win every argument. I made choices earlier in the process—at the grocery store, in my kitchen, and through the routines I created—so I was not forced to fight the same battle every hour of every day.
I am still discovering tools. My body changes, my life changes, and new situations reveal things I did not know about myself before. I do not see that as evidence that I failed to finish the work. I see it as part of continuing to pay attention.
Your tools may be different from mine. You may need to change what comes into your home, examine what you learned about food growing up, create a pause before eating, ask for help, or become more honest about a food you keep insisting you can control when your experience and actions says otherwise. The fix begins with telling yourself the truth.
When I Knew Something Had Changed
There was a time when food occupied nearly every corner of my mind. I thought about what I would eat, when I could eat, whether I deserved something, whether I should start over tomorrow, and whether I could stop after one bite.
Food was constantly negotiating with me, and I did not realize how exhausting that was because it felt normal. Then one day, I realized I had gone hours without thinking about food. Which may not sound remarkable to someone who has never felt controlled by it, but it was extraordinary to me. The constant negotiation had gone quiet. I had not forced it, and I had not noticed the change while it was happening. I simply realized that food was no longer demanding my attention all day.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love food. It’s a huge part of my life. I create recipes, I cook, I post YouTube videos of healthy dishes that I create, enjoy delicious meals, and believe food is one of the ways we nourish ourselves and connect with other people. And at the same time, I am well aware that I can overdo it on the kimchi.
The difference is that I notice more now. I know that healthy food can nourish my body while addictive behavior still deserves my attention. I know which lines protect me, and I understand that changing what I eat is only part of changing the relationship.
When people hear that I lost 140 pounds, they often assume the greatest transformation happened on the outside. It did not. The greatest transformation happened when I turned inward and started asking what my body needed, what food was being asked to do for me in my life, and whether the answer was really another bite.
That is the truth about my relationship with food. It remains one of the most important relationships in my life—and for years, it was one I never thought to examine. I focused on the food, the weight, and what I needed to stop eating without looking closely enough at the relationship underneath it all.
If this article has you thinking differently about your own relationship with food, you can email me directly at info@noblealchemy.com with questions or to start a conversation about what you are noticing, what you want to change, and whether coaching might be right for you.
That kind of awareness is at the heart of The Awakened Body. Pick up a copy if you are ready to look more closely at what your body has been trying to tell you. Sometimes the body is asking for food. Sometimes it is asking for something food cannot provide. Learning the difference changed my life.