Safety First: Feeling Safe Around Difficult Foods

When someone is in recovery or has had a disordered relationship with food, promoting safety in their food experiences can be very helpful. How can we do that? What does it mean for someone to feel safe or unsafe in regards to experiences with food? What happens when someone feels unsafe in their body?

When we think about the experience of feeling unsafe in our body, what's happening is the sympathetic nervous system - or the fight, flight, flee, or faint response - is being activated. When that happens, resources are shunted away from your digestive system. In order to prioritize being able to run from whatever is making you feel unsafe, your body is sending that energy into your skeletal muscles and your respiratory and cardiovascular systems. At that point in time, while you are feeling unsafe, your body deems other functions "non-essential" - such as hair growth, reproduction, and digestion. While we can hold space that all of these things are indeed important, your body is going to hit pause on these things if it deems that your life is being threatened.

So, let's think about ways to promote safety within a food environment.

• We definitely want to activate the parasympathetic nervous system - which is rest and digest.

  • Breathing in and breathing out in a controlled or comfortable way

    • This may not be accessible if someone is really agitated, but exhaling in particular is a great way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Example: Think about breathing exercises in yoga class. When you exhale, you are asked to breathe out through your mouth. Try that now. Feel how your shoulders just dropped and relaxed? Exactly.

• Thinking about the physical parts of your food experience and how you can make that feel safer. The idea is not necessarily to control what or how much we are eating, especially if you have specific goals around that for your recovery. But, we can make that food feel a little safer by controlling the other elements of the experience.

  • Who are you eating with?

    • If you have a family member who is triggering or prone to making comments about diet culture, choosing to eat a difficult food away from them may be helpful.

    • Also, letting them know (at whatever spice level you feel comfortable with) that you do not want to talk about food.

  • What is the setting that you are eating in?

    • Maybe getting takeout and bringing that food home would help make it feel safer.

    • Wearing comfortable clothing can help as well!

  • What are you seeing in front of you?

    • Have a distraction ready - maybe a tv show or movie.

    • Pop some headphones on!

  • What are you talking about?

    • Keeping conversations on topics that feel safe and comfortable while challenging yourself.

These are just a few examples of how we can work on keeping ourselves feeling safe while we work to heal our relationship with food. It can be challenging to confront the sympathetic nervous system's impulse to flee, but we can utilize tools in order to reassure our bodies that they are safe with us.