In this YouTube talk, health coach Hadlee Garrison shares her personal journey from a lifelong dysfunctional relationship with food—characterized by restriction, bingeing, and emotional eating—to a research‑informed understanding of diet culture and disordered eating. Drawing on her MPH training at the University of Michigan, she explains how diet industry messaging and societal norms have fostered unhealthy food mentalities, contributing to both mental and physical health issues. Garrison then outlines six practical steps to rehabilitate one’s relationship with food: (1) ditch rigid rules and listen to internal cues; (2) accept and respect your body as it is; (3) replace guilt with curiosity about how foods affect you; (4) perform a pre‑meal body check‑in using hunger scales or body scans; (5) make food choices based on desired feelings and basic nutrition knowledge rather than external dictates; and (6) enlist professional or social support such as coaches, therapists, or trusted friends. She acknowledges the difficulty of these changes, offers a free 30‑minute health‑goals call, and invites viewers to discuss their own food relationships and health objectives.
Chapters
Hi everyone, I just wanted to pop in today and talk a little bit about our relationships with food. I wanted to elaborate a little bit on a post that I recently, that I recently posted about how to develop a healthier relationship with food. So a little bit about my background is that throughout my life I had a totally dysfunctional relationship with food. I restricted, I binged, I emotionally ate, I was completely disconnected from my body, from its cues, from its needs. And really for a really long time, I didn't even realize that my relationship with food was unhealthy. I just kind of thought I was trying to be healthy. And then sometimes I was really succeeding and sometimes I was totally failing. And it wasn't really until a friend described her binge eating disorder to me that I realized I was actually acting out disordered eating patterns for almost half of my life. And so this realization was hugely impactful on me and on my health trajectory, as well as my trajectory trajectory in the health field from then on. So before, I had kind of embraced this mentality that is really a diet culture mentality, that if I could just like follow a meal plan or follow some sort of plan and have enough willpower around food, then everything would be totally fine. I would look the way I would want to look. I would feel how I wanted to feel. I'd be totally happy and free, and all these things would be magical and wonderful, but I just didn't have the self-control or the willpower to get there. But it's actually not how our bodies or even our day-to-day lives, our behaviors things like that work as much as diet industry would have us believe that it does work that way. It totally doesn't. So as I dove into more research about disordered eating, diet culture, the different mentalities around food, whether that's all or nothing or perfectionism or scarcity, all those kinds of things, I started to realize that this wasn't just detrimental to our mental health patterns surrounding food. It was actually also counterproductive to having a healthy body physically. So throughout my time in my master's in public health at University of Michigan, I delved into kind of the further research to find out how this really societally prevalent dysfunctional relationship with food was created. And, you know, it was created over the past century from the diet industry as well as, you know, the different food industries and things like that. So I went into why so many prevention programs, health health programs and things like that weren't successful in the long term and why more people than ever before are suffering from autoimmune issues, digestive issues, chronic, chronic issues that have to do with lifestyle and eating patterns. And so I started learning more about this. And as I started learning more about it and being more vocal about my experience, how my perception of food and how I was kind of nourishing my body was changing, I started talking about this with like all these different people, my friends, um, you know, my different people in my cohort in my master's program, and different, um, you know, family members, things like this, I realized that actually so many people had the exact same mental patterns around food that I had. So I had thought that it was kind of— I was one of the few. It turned out that I was— it was so, so common that no one had even thought it was problematic at all until they really dove into, oh, what am I actually thinking about around food and what are my food choices actually based on? And then they started to recognize that, oh yeah, this isn't totally healthy for me, sustainable for me long-term. So this brings me to health coaching and that's of course what I do now. So almost every single person that I've talked to who wants to improve their health or wants to have a healthier relationship with their body, their food, their health behaviors, their habits, different things like this, Almost every single person I've talked to has a wonky, if not totally dysfunctional relationship with food. Of course, these are all to different degrees, even if they don't realize it at first that they have this weird relationship with food. So one of my missions as a health coach is to help people rehabilitate their relationship with food so we can actually achieve our health goals from a place of respect and acceptance of our bodies and even a self-love way of doing it. We don't actually need to have all this fear and shame and guilt around our food choices, whether we're, you know, quote unquote following the rules or quote unquote on the wagon, you know, how our bodies look, all of these things in order to feel the best that we've ever felt in our bodies. So we can actually do that while having this really respectful and loving relationship with ourselves and with our food. So these are some of the tips that I've found helpful in developing a healthier relationship with food throughout my research, as well as in actual practice with my health coaching clients. These are the things that are really, really, really helpful for people to change their mindset around food as well as to change some of that behavior around food as well. So the first thing is that we really want to ditch any hard and fast rules around food. So instead of basing our food choices on external rules, how much to eat, what to eat, what not to eat, all of these different things that we've been told, and a lot of it is conflicting as well, we wanna actually check into our bodies to see see what our bodies need, desire in that moment. So you can absolutely use guidelines to help you figure out what feels best in your body. And that's something that I work on with a lot of my clients is to figure out what actually does feel good for your body and to maybe use some guidelines and some different things to be able to inform that decision, to have some nutrition knowledge and how that affects your body. But You always want to have the caveat that your body knows better than any external source what it needs. So the next thing, tip number 2, is to accept your body as it is. So like I said before, we can totally achieve health goals from a place of acceptance and respect for our bodies. So berating ourselves, hating our bodies, all of these things that we have maybe been told will work to bully ourselves into getting to a place that we want to get to with our health or with how our bodies look, different things like this, it's actually counterproductive in the pursuit of, yes, your mental health for sure, and also your physical health, which is less commonly known. So that's the second thing is to really accept your body as it is. Of course, that's gonna be easier said than done, but we'll talk a little bit about how to actually start implementing these things. So the third tip is to trade guilt For curiosity. So we wanna get curious about how different foods make us feel, but we don't wanna get into a place where we feel guilty whenever food doesn't make us feel really good, or whenever, you know, we start to have some sort of reaction in our bodies that tell us that the food that we ate doesn't make us feel good. So instead of associating food choices to having some sort of morality, a lot of times we talk about food as either good or bad. So instead of talking about food in that way and our food choices in that way, it's really valuable to just look at our body's responses to food as just valuable information that we can use in the future. So, oh, I ate this thing, it didn't make me feel very good in this situation, in this setting. How am I gonna use that information in the future? And maybe it's to avoid that food in the future, or maybe it's to try it again, if it works in a different context. Maybe it's, um, you know, whatever it is, it's without judgment of whether that decision is good or bad. Of course, you want to be able to follow any sort of medical guidelines, um, you know, that your doctor may give you or, or that kind of thing. So you want to take this with a grain of salt. You want to be able to, um, you know, use this information as well as some of the guidelines and just know that you can You can have a healthy relationship with food, follow a meal plan if that's something that's really specific to whatever your body is going through at this moment, and you can do it in a way that is respectful of yourself and respectful of your body. So the 4th thing that we wanna do is to check in with our body's needs and desires before we eat. So our body's needs and desires are always changing. You can kind of check in with your body, do a, you know, a body scan, check in with maybe how your stomach's feeling, maybe how your heart is feeling, maybe how your mind is feeling. You can check in with all different parts of your body. It doesn't just have to be your stomach. And you can ask yourself how hungry you are, how your body wants to feel, all of these different kinds of things. You can check and see, you know, maybe you use a hunger scale. And that's something that I talk about with my members. Hunger scale can be from, you know, really, really hungry to, So, so, so full, and you can be somewhere on that range. And maybe you check in and see where you are on that range, but maybe you also figure out, okay, what— how do I want to feel, and what kinds of foods are gonna make me feel that way? So step number 5 is making your choice. So once you've ditched the rules, which we talked about in step 1, and you know how you want to feel, you can choose foods based on those desired feelings. So obviously it's really helpful to have some basic knowledge of nutrition. Nutrition here. And if you're working with a nutritionist or a doctor or some sort of nutrition therapist or a coach or something like that, you want to take these things into consideration, but also to think about how does my body really want to feel right now and what kinds of foods do I need to eat in order to make my body feel that way. And you can make your choice based on that rather than, oh, I, you know, someone on the internet told me that I need to follow this This diet plan, or even, you know, somebody told me that I need to not eat these things, or I need to eat this thing all the time. If you do want to kind of figure out how to, how to have a little bit more nutrition knowledge, that's something that I would be— I would love to talk to you about, and I'll talk about that in, in a second. So number 6 is to enlist help. So you don't have to change your relationship with food by yourself. So talking about your mental patterns around food with people who you make sure you feel safe with them can be really incredibly helpful. And of course, finding a coach, a therapist, a doctor, or another professional to help you work through your relationship with food and improve that relationship with food is usually the most effective and the safest route if you do want to shift that for yourself. So obviously all of these methods for building a healthier relationship with food are easier said than done, and I totally recognize that. These are just a start. So if you do want to talk further about your relationship with food and even how that might relate to the health goals that you have for yourself and how those things can be complementary to each other rather than be in opposition, you can totally sign up for a health goals call with me. They're free, they're 30 minutes. This is one of my deepest passions in helping people figure out for themselves, and I would be so, so honored honored to be a listening ear for you to figure out, you know, how you might be able to make this work, and then also help you figure out what you want to do to take those next steps, what you might want, what you might need to do in order to shift that, that relationship with food, whether it's, you know, working with a therapist, or if I feel like, you know, we could work together, I would, I will totally offer that. But regardless of, you know, what we decide for you, this is a great opportunity to be able to just talk a little bit about how your relationship with food has been in the past, how you want it to be in the future, and kind of how to get there. So you can sign up for your health coaches— or your, sorry, your health goals call. And I look forward to talking to you and helping you with developing that healthier relationship with food. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.
