Yes, You Can Change Your Relationship With Food — Here’s How

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Yes, You Can Change Your Relationship With Food — Here’s How

You can change your relationship with food without controlling the food itself. Just like you can’t force another person to change, you can’t force food to behave differently either. What you can change is your thoughts about it, and that shift is what changes your eating habits.

I’m Kate Johnston, a former Physician Assistant with 15 years of clinical experience, and now an eating habits and weight loss coach for women in healthcare. I help women break free from overeating, emotional eating, and mindless eating habits, even the ones that have stuck around for years. Here’s the thing… most people think they need to control food harder. That’s not actually it. Let me show you what is.

What is a relationship with food?

A relationship with food is made up of three things:

• Your thoughts about food
• How you feel about food
• Your actions or behaviors around food

It works the exact same way as a relationship with a person. Any relationship with another person is made up of your thoughts about them, how you feel about them, and the actions you take (or don’t take) around them. So if your thoughts are positive and healthy, you feel good, and your actions follow along. That’s a healthy relationship, at least on your end.

Why can’t you just force a better relationship with food?

You can’t force a better relationship with food for the same reason you can’t force a person to change.

Here’s an example. Let’s say your partner keeps leaving the toilet seat up, and you’ve asked over and over and nothing changes. If your thought is “he disrespects me, he can’t even do this one simple thing,” that thought creates irritation. The irritation makes your next comment come out sharp. He gets defensive. Now there’s tension, and the whole thing spirals.

But if you shift the thought, even slightly, to something like “it’s probably just habit, I know he loves and respects me,” the feeling changes too. Less irritation, more neutrality, maybe even warmth. And your response softens along with it.

Food works the same way. You’re not trying to control the food. You’re changing your thought about it, on your end, so the whole dynamic shifts.

Can you stop overeating without using willpower?

Yes. Stopping overeating doesn’t come from willpower. It comes from changing the thought driving the eating habit in the moment.

Picture a full pizza in front of you. If your thought is “I’m starving, I could eat this whole thing,” that thought creates urgency. The urgency leads to eating four slices without really thinking about it.

Now picture the same pizza, but the thought is “I’m hungry, let me start with two slices and see how I feel.” That thought creates a calmer feeling. There’s no rush. So you pause after two slices, you check in with yourself, and you decide on purpose whether you want more. Maybe yes, maybe no. But now it’s a choice, not a reaction.

That’s the difference between a habit running on autopilot and a habit you’re actually steering.

What does this look like with a real client?

One of my clients, a nurse, used to see “good” food as something she couldn’t stop eating once she started. If her husband brought home takeout, or she took her kids out for ice cream, her thought was “this is too good, I don’t want to stop.” That thought created overdesire, and overdesire led to eating past comfortably full every time.

She knew it didn’t feel good. She knew it was contributing to weight gain. But that knowledge alone never changed the habit. That’s exactly why “just stop eating” doesn’t work as advice. It’s not a willpower problem. It’s a thought, feeling, action loop.

So in our work together, we didn’t focus on controlling the food. We focused on changing her thinking. Her new thought became “this is good, and I don’t need to overeat it.” That one shift created a totally different feeling, more calm, more control. From that place, stopping at enough became natural. Now she can go out for ice cream, get a kiddie size, enjoy it fully, and move on. Same food. Different relationship.

What if the eating habit isn’t about hunger at all?

Sometimes it isn’t. Another client of mine, an attorney, would beat herself up every time she ate a pint of ice cream at night. So her relationship with food, and honestly with herself, wasn’t good.

Rather than focusing on stopping the ice cream, I had her do something different. Stop judging it. Start getting curious about it instead. We looked at what was actually driving the habit, and it turned out it wasn’t hunger. It was emotion. Anytime she felt sad, insecure, or frustrated, her brain suggested ice cream.

So we worked on identifying those emotions and processing them in a simple way. Over time, ice cream just became… ice cream. Not a coping mechanism, not something bad, not something to feel guilty about. Just food. And because of that shift, she became more intentional. She started eating it when she actually wanted it, rather than when she was trying to fix a feeling. She enjoyed it more. And she naturally started losing weight.

How do you start changing your relationship with food today?

Here are four simple steps to use the next time you eat something you didn’t plan to eat:

1. Notice it for what it is. Just say, “Okay, I ate ______.” Not “I messed up.”
2. Strip the meaning off of it. It doesn’t say anything about your discipline, your control, or your ability to change.
3. Take a few breaths and shake it off. This calms your nervous system and helps you move forward.
4. Notice how you feel afterward. It will probably feel different than your usual reaction. And when you feel different, your next action will be different too.

Start doing this today. Then do it again tomorrow if you need to, and the next day. Consistency is what matters here, rather than getting it perfect. Starting small makes it easier to stay consistent, and that’s what you build from.

Is this about controlling food better?

No. This isn’t about controlling food or forcing better behavior. It’s about shifting the thoughts and emotions underneath your eating, since that’s actually where the change happens. Same foods, same situations, just a different relationship with them on your end.

If you’re a woman in healthcare who’s tired of the cycle of overeating, guilt, and shame around food and your body, you don’t have to figure this out alone. I help women in healthcare get free from the frustration and shame around their eating habits and weight, free from the constant food noise, and into a place where they finally feel calm, confident, and in control around food and in their body.

Book a free consult with me, and let’s look at what’s actually keeping you stuck and map out your next steps together.

Kate Johnston is an Eating Habits and Weight Loss Coach, host of the Eating Habits for Life podcast, and a former Physician Assistant with 15 years of clinical experience. She specializes in helping women in healthcare break overeating and emotional eating habits for good through mindset and strategy coaching in her 1:1 program, Lighter.