Why Does Food Feel Hard?
Written by Allison Easton, RD
March is Nutrition Month
This year’s theme is Nourish to Flourish. We want to highlight the nuance around what it means to be nourished. This isn’t simply achieving adequate nutrients, but finding a way to feed yourself that is supportive to your mental health, emotional wellbeing and honours your capacity.
In all of this, something that isn’t talked about enough is that food can actually feel really hard. At times, nourishing yourself may feel like a daunting task.
This feeling starts somewhere and can be true for several reasons. Let’s begin at the root of why food may feel hard, when we begin to understand the why it can help us move toward caring for ourselves and flourishing.
Why food may feel hard
Perhaps you have never been taught or learned skills around food. While growing up, food felt hard in your home. You are living with an eating disorder. You are living with neurodivergence. You are trying to meet the unrelenting demands of life. It may also be a combination of all these things and more.
In a culture full of comparison, it can seem like everyone else knows what they are doing with food, and you don’t.
There is a lot of mental labour associated with food. Food is a basic necessity and yet, it comes with a great deal of responsibility.
Constant planning – multiple times a day
Grocery shopping – which includes several steps
Preparing meals - which includes several stages of preparation
Cleaning up after meals
And everything in between
If any part of this process, or all parts of this process are challenging or feel difficult, it can make the entire experience feel overwhelming and out of reach. Layer in disordered eating and/or neurodivergence and the process becomes increasingly harder.
There can be fear and perfectionism associated with food
We are conditioned over our lifetime to believe that food needs to look a certain way. From Pinterest posts to influencers What I eat in a Day, food can feel like yet another pass or fail. Food has become binary => good or bad; healthy or unhealthy; right or wrong. There is morality associated with food and this can leave you feeling like there is a lot at stake when making choices about nourishing yourself. It also means that food can become emotionally charged.
Living with neurodivergence means there may be differences in your executive function - your brain’s management system that helps plan, organize, focus, remember and juggle tasks. This impacts how you approach and interact with food. Executive functioning plays a very big role in planning, preparing and eating food.
Years of dieting, lack of safety and/or neurodivergence may have left you with less connection to your body’s cues. This may make anticipating hunger difficult which in turn makes planning to eat challenging.
Regardless of the reason, food can feel hard.
Acknowledging this is a starting point in reducing the associated stigma. You are not broken – you are human. You are deserving of more ease with food and that may mean shifting your approach to it.
Offer yourself kindness, self-compassion and permission
Offering yourself compassion is a really good place to start. This means being gentler with yourself rather than critical or judgemental. Harsh inner thoughts can keep us stuck.
Kindness and acceptance can offer a foundation for change. No one chooses to struggle with food. It is the consequence of a collection of lived experiences.
Permission is an important and powerful component of changing your relationship with food.
Permission to:
Make manageable (aka small) adjustments - avoid the pull toward overhaul
Not try to be perfect with food and feeding yourself
Have days that feel easier and days that feel harder
Use low cook or convenience foods because fed is best
Eat in a way that is unique to you
Use services that honour your capacity
Curate your social media feed. Consciously or subconsciously, the media you absorb can directly impact how you feel. Social media can contribute to feelings of distress or incompetence with food. You have the autonomy to determine what feels helpful and what feels harmful. Unfollow accounts that trigger the critical inner thoughts. Consider following accounts that may support you in building a more easeful relationship with food.
If any of this resonates with you, know that you are not alone. These challenges are not a personal failure—they are a human response to lived experiences.
To flourish is to grow, and this Nutrition Month, we invite you to commit to personal growth. More specifically, personal growth with your understanding of your unique food relationship, and that includes understanding why food can feel hard.
