Your Quiz Results

Struggling with Eating, Food and Weight

Thank you for taking the Do I Have a Healthy Relationship with Food? quiz. Your results suggest that food, eating and weight cause you some distress, and take up more time than you’d like in your day to day life.

Many who fall in the category don’t realize that they can manage their eating and weight with little to no stress. To find a sense of peace around food and eating, it’s helpful to start with what is broken about most eating recommendations. This will help you figure out what needs to be fixed.

Moving from Struggling to a Sense of Peace with Food, Eating and Weight

“To eat heathy,” you were likely told, “divide food into good and bad categories, avoid the bad foods and eat the good foods.” Easy-peasy. Now you will be healthy.

It works. At first. But slowly you find yourself more and more interested in those bad foods. Your promised yourself you would not eat them, so you decide to only have one bite. Before you know it, you’ve eaten way more than one bite.

Our clients tell us they feel crazy because they can’t do “this simple thing” of avoiding bad foods. Have you ever found yourself:

  • Overly interested in a box of cookies?

  • Eating dessert when you had planned to skip it?

  • Craving the foods you were avoiding?

  • Feeling out-of-control around food?

Our culture’s approach to food has set you up. Your response is actually normal. In fact, there is research starting way back in the ‘60s when avoid bad food / eating good food ideas took off, showing it creates say more problems than it solves.

Most eating guidelines out there will contribute to eating struggles, including (believe it or not):

  • Monitoring portions

  • Managing macros or micros or whatever

  • Counting calories

  • Following a specific meal plan

You end up on somewhere on a continuum of disordered eating depicted in the following graph. Based on the results from this quiz, you appear to be in the middle of the range. (The further left you are, the more likely you are to successfully manage your eating and weight.)

The System Failed You

It is important to understand how our culture’s approach to food and eating sets us up to fail. We tell our clients that this is NOT their fault. In fact, once our clients begin to realize how these guidelines set them up, we often ask, “If someone asked you to sign a release of liability to sign before you started manipulating your food, listing all the predictable negative consequences of doing so, would you have signed it?” The answer is always no!

Do not blame yourself if you have disordered eating or an eating disorder.

But do know that complete recovery is possible. Please feel free to reach out to us if we can help you. Below are suggestions to help you begin to heal, followed by some specific tips.

 

Healing Eating Struggles

To get on the healing journey, read such books as:

Take some time on our website, EatingWisdom.

Check out articles, such as: 

  • Why Quit Dieting?

  • Finding Freedom with Food

  • For the Spouse, Parent, Sibling, or Friend

  • And more

Check out our online course:

What is life like without eating issues? Check out this article on intuitive eating.

 

Getting Professional Help

Consider seeking professional assistance, because you can truly be free of eating issues. You can get to the place you never worry about your weight again, even during holidays.

If you decide to see a therapist and/or nutritionist, make sure they specialize in these issues. For more on what to look for, read the chapter Karin wrote that was published in The Eating Disorder Sourcebook by Costin.

 

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The Do I Have a Healthy Relationship with Food? quiz is given for informational and educational purposes only, and does not substitute for any psychological, nutritional and/or medical evaluations performed by a qualified professional. Please consult a qualified professional with any concerns.