A healthy relationship with food

I posted the below picture to my Instagram last Friday night. I was craving something sweet and on my way home from a massage I went to the store and picked up some B&J. Bad, yes. But satsifying? Yes, yes, tripled yes! When it comes to food, it is all about making the right choices and having a healthy relationship with food. It shouldn’t be a chore and feeling guilty about some of the choices you make is, from my experience, always a bad idea.

What do you consider a healthy relationship with food?

If you scroll through my Instagram feed and if you’ve seen any of my What I Eat blog posts, you might think that all I eat is healthy food. But that’s not the case. Healthy food is simply more photogenic than junk food, but it is also what I eat most of the time. I try to stick to an 80% – 20% division between healthy and junk foods. So just because you hardly see it on here, doesn’t mean I don’t eat it.

When it comes to ‘bad’ food, I am a sucker for all things sweet. I have a major sweet tooth and if I could I would eat chocolate every single day. But that’s a bad idea, so I try to limit myself to once a week. Are there times where I have it more often? Yes, I do, but then I try to make sure to balance it out again by paying some more attention to what I eat the week after.

In my experience, fighting the cravings is much much worse than trying to give into one or two from time to time. The trick is to limit the amount of cravings you get. Eating sugar leads to craving sugar. In other words, the more you eat it, the more you’ll crave it. Making sure you eat enough in a day and you plan your ‘bad’ moments into your week, might make it more manageable. For me, in any case, it does.

I tend to save my 20% for the weekend. In fact, I try to cram my 20% into one day. I usually get groceries on Saturday. I then allow myself to buy 1 or 2 ‘bad food items’ and have that all on that same Saturday. On Sunday, I go back to having good food again. This way I am satisfying whatever craving I may have. And during the week I can tell myself: no, you will have your chance on Saturday.

Naturally, it happens that I’ll have something during the week or that I don’t cram everything into one day. Especially if I’m attending birthdays, hanging out with friends or colleagues are handing out food at work, I tend to be someone who likes to indulge in those little moments. When that happens, I simply try to counteract that by not going overboard during the weekend. And I’m not going to lie: there are weeks where I don’t and I will simply balance it out again during the following week.

In the end, the food you eat is about choices you make. But food is also a social thing. My philosophy is that as long as I don’t do it every single day, work out and eat healthy meals and snacks on the regular, those bad moments won’t hurt much from time to time.

How do you keep a healthy balance?