Grow By Design

58. Understanding your relationship with food - I have a degree in this! A series on understanding, educating and enhancing your relationship with food

• Jess Greene • Season 1 • Episode 58

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Today's episode is all about understanding your relationship with food. 

This is an episode I have wanted to record for a long time but have not known where to start, it is such a big topic! although something I am very well versed in - I have a degree in this! 

If you are someone who has struggled to know what to eat, or you have a tough relationship with food and body image or anything along those lines this is the episode for you! 

I have studied, worked and lived in this world for the last 15 years in my own personal food and body image journey, my life as an athlete, a passionate foodie, and a diet culture-recovered woman and also in my academic and professional careers - there is no one who understands food and our relationship with it quite like me! 

This episode is the first in a series of episodes all about understanding, educating, healing and enhancing your relationship with food because even though it can be so complex it can also be very simple! 

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Hello and welcome back to the Go By Design podcast. I am so excited to have you here. I am so excited to be back. I know it has been a little while between podcasts, but I am back and I've got some really exciting content coming your way and I'm really excited about this. So there'll be a few more interviews. I won't give too much away, but some interviews, just some good conversations. And I'm actually going to be sharing quite a lot about what I have been going through and doing in the last couple of weeks and months, which I'm really excited for.

Today's episode is something that I have been wanting to talk about for a really long time, and I keep meaning to talk about it, but I haven't kind of known how to, and there's so much that I wanna share and unpack in this topic that it's actually gonna be something that I continue to talk about over a couple of episodes. And I guess now I'm kind of procrastinating, but I'm going to talk to you today about understanding your relationship with food. And I'm gonna go into a bit of background around why I have so much knowledge in this space and what my experience has been, both personally and professionally. And also then kind of leading into that, how you can start to understand your relationship with food, how you can use that to improve your life, improve your health, and also just understand what kind of impact that has on the food that you buy, the food that you consume, the way you approach eating in terms of diet and lifestyle, whether that's losing weight, whether that's wanting to understand food better, all of those kind of things all come into play around understanding your relationship with food. So I'm going to deep dive into all of that and then over the next couple of episodes I've got an expert coming on to explain like how I now manage my food and some of the barriers that I've learnt to overcome by understanding more about food in terms of calories and nutrition and how I track and calculate the food that I eat. 

I obviously know it in and out, but it's much nicer when it's coming from someone who is super qualified to talk about all this kind of stuff. And then from there, we've got obviously lots of tips and tricks on how to make that easier for you in your life, how you can improve your relationship with food and then overall how you can improve your relationship with your body and the people around you and the way that you talk to yourself and understand food. So bit of a long winded introduction, but.

I guess where I want to start today is explaining to you how I have come to understand my relationship with food and what that actually means. So I guess going right back to the start, I have always been really interested in food and nutrition and diet and exercise. And I guess that started from a body image perspective being in a body shape and size that I didn't particularly love. So this is maybe when I was in my teenage years and things like that going through school and university, I put on some weight and I didn't really know how or why. And I then also didn't know how or why to lose it again. And I was playing lots of sport and I was really active, but I just wasn't comfortable in my body. And I think that so many people can relate to this in the sense that we know that we need to do something different and we know that probably our nutrition has got something to do with it

And so many people, and I was exactly the same, we try so many things and we try and be really, like quote unquote, good with our food. We try and make smart food decisions, but often we actually don't know what those smart food decisions are. And so we think we're doing something right. We think we're doing the healthy thing. We think we're doing what we need to do to lose weight, but we actually don't understand mechanics behind it. And so then of course, when we're going to fail, we're not going to get the results we want, because we don't understand the fundamental principles, which again, I'll come back to. And that's where I have learned about like tracking calories and tracking macros and things like that. But I guess coming back to the start again, I wanted to understand food and I wanted to understand nutrition and I wanted to be able to create the body that I wanted. And I've also always been really interested in how different people view food. And so my whole career and my whole kind of life has actually been built around that without really knowing until now. And I look back and reflect, but in university, I studied marketing and I studied economics and I was really interested in food and I actually did a food marketing paper and I did my honors dissertation in food marketing. So I wanted to understand everything there was about food food and nutrition at the time I was also like deep into the, I guess, world of say like Dr. Libby and health. And I wanted to start a food company. I wanted to start a nut butter company. I wanted to start a fancy granola company. I made these products called like super food sprinkles, which was a variety of like nuts and seeds and granolas and berries and things that you would put on top of like salads and oats. And I laugh now because I was somewhat ahead of the time in terms of like creating these products. And I remember my dad saying that there was no money in like peanut butter. People can buy that from the supermarket now. And then about two years later, PICS, peanut butter came out in New Zealand and they were selling peanut butter for like $10 a jar and granola for $18 and things like that. And I just laugh and say, you know, I was ahead of the curve because I saw these food trends coming out and I was creating ways of, you know, how I could consume them in my daily life And I really wanted to turn that into a food product. So I kind of went through university thinking, this is great, I'm gonna get my degree in food marketing and then I'm gonna leave and I'm gonna start this health and wellness company with superfood sprinkles and fancy peanut butter and granola and stuff like that. So from a, like for a long time, my interest has been in food. Like I love going to the supermarket, I love going to whole food shops and seeing the different products and seeing the different stuff that's out there. And then I kind of went down the product lens in terms of like what new interesting foods are there out there. And I was also kind of looking for diet solutions and healthy food in that sense of low calorie or low sugar or high in XYZ. So I sort of looked at that quite a lot, but I also was like so far down the rabbit hole of diet culture. And I'm sure that so many people can resonate with this. I looked and... read at every diet and every book out there because I just didn't know how to do it. I didn't understand what I was meant to be doing and so I just did what everyone else did. I followed the trends. I did a juice cleanse. I read the book from this guy called James Dugan, which was about like the lean, clean, lean flat tummy or something like that, like, you know, all about gut health and all that kind of stuff. And

I followed Ashbyne's and I did like the clean eating plan and I did clean eating and I did all these crazy things and I don't obviously regret any of that because it just added to my knowledge and I just kept accumulating knowledge on the impact of stress on our body, the impact of you know calories and all these kind of things which was really interesting and really helpful and also hormones and all that kind of stuff played a big part of it. So throughout I guess my professional interest in terms of food and food marketing. And then my personal interest in terms of how do I lose weight? How do I create the body that I want? I ended up in this kind of rabbit hole of diet culture and health products and things like that. And I spent so much of my life like thinking about food, thinking about what I was gonna eat. It was such a point of stress for me that actually I used my end of year dissertation. I think I sort of in my head was like, yeah, this is for for university and for the company and things like that. But it was definitely for me and my understanding. So my end of year dissertation, so I spent my whole year researching this and I wrote a paper on it and it was called Understanding Your Relationship with Food and Your Concept of Self. And so what that dissertation was all about is I just wanted to understand like how do other people think about food because surely not everyone thinks about it as much as I do because like.

No one's talking about it and that would be bloody exhausting. And like, how else can I do this so that I don't think about it all the time? Um, and I just saw food as this really interesting product and this really interesting thing, and I also at the time saw this really interesting change in perspective. So food and diet culture was becoming a way of people expressing themselves as a person. So in marketing, we have lots of concepts around self-actualization and the ideal self. And quite often people use brands and products to present a perception of who they are. So you shop designer bags to present a type of persona, you shop and you buy a certain car to give you a certain look. And I was starting to see this trend happen in food. So we started to see diet culture become a concept of self. So if you were paleo, it was because you were cross-fitting, you were hardcore. If you were vegan, it was you know that you were supporting sustainable practices, if you were keto it's because you're healthy. All these labels for food started becoming a way to differentiate yourself in society and give you like give you a concept of self and so there was this really interesting change where instead of just being I eat food you know breakfast lunch and dinner it's it became a really cultivated and curated way of presenting who you are in the world and what your values are which I thought was a really interesting sort of Change so all of that compiled I started to do some research into that and I wanted to understand how you know So this is ridiculous, but some of my like I Guess quote-unquote skinny friends. How did they think about food and did they like how did they make it look so easy? How did they eat whatever they want and then?

just still look lean and trim. And I now understand that part of that was stress, part of that was the fact that they just didn't really eat that often. And then when they did, they had big meals. It was their genetics. Like it was a whole variety of different things, but I was just so curious at this point of like, okay, how does this all fit together? How does this puzzle fit? And you know, what can I do and understand to understand this more, I guess. So I spend the year

interviewing people and understanding food. And I know that this hopefully you're sort of following along with this conversation, but where I ended up is what was quite interesting for me is food is so, is one of those products. And this is why I really got into it from a business perspective that food and consuming food and buying food is something that we as humans have to do every single day, most days, obviously.

And we don't have any other products like that. There's nothing else out there apart from water, but it comes from a tap where we actually need to eat something every day to live a healthy, functional life. And there's not many other products out there or things out there that we consume in such a way. And so for me, it was, okay, we have to, as humans make a food decision every couple of hours, every day of our lives. And how do we go about making those decisions?


what drives those decisions and why is it not as simple as, you know, to live a healthy life, people should eat xyz and we just eat it and we carry on with our day. Food is such a big part of our life, not just from a functional we need this to survive, but from a social perspective, from a family perspective, from a status perspective. So food is this really interesting and detailed


Jess (12:17.466)

in it's wrapped up in body image, it's wrapped up in cultures, it's wrapped up in family, it's wrapped up in connection, it's wrapped up in status and symbolization. And so it is just so much more complex than we need to eat 2000 calories a day to survive and it should be chicken and rice, you know, an apple, blah, blah, blah. It's so much more complicated than that. And I think that that's what people get so confused about is


Jess (12:47.646)

It's one very tied to our emotions. It's also very tied to our routines, but it's also, you know, our genetics player role, our position in society player role, what we know, what we, how we grew up, all those different things. And then the fact, obviously taste is also really important that, you know, we as humans are wanting to eat things that taste nice. If it was just a function of eating, this would be quite a different.


story but the fact that it's wrapped with obviously different senses so our smell, our taste and then it's wrapped with different social cues. It is a very complex beast to understand and so I spent, as I said, like the large part of the last 10 to 15 years exploring that. So I then have kind of a professional perspective because I have worked in the food industry for 10 years. I have a bodybuilding perspective which is, you know, how to get to this.


Jess (13:45.978)

XYZ shape, but I'm also such a foodie in the sense that my favorite thing is to go to the supermarket and look at new products. My second favorite thing is to look at menus online and see what restaurants are creating and what flavors are trending and interesting combinations of food and texture and things like that. So I would totally travel to the far corners of the city or the country to explore and try different things, which is quite interesting when you're


bodybuilder and you then your taste buds are very bland but I have quite a unique perspective on food and so what I want to use this episode to do is kind of one I guess initially provoke a whole lot of thought so I think probably in this last brain dump of of insights this has really got you thinking around like holy shit this is way more complex than I ever realized.


but it's also way simpler than what it's made out to be, if that makes sense. So I guess to take it back again, our initial understanding of food and the way that we eat and the lessons that we have initially comes from our parents, because for the first, let's say 15 years of our life, they kind of dictate what we eat. And yes, you have kids who are obviously very fussy or they eat certain things.


and those tastes and preferences change over time and as we get older, we can start to choose what we want to eat, but our parents have a huge role in defining the way that we view food, what we like, what we don't like and things like that. So depending on their relationship with food, it can really impact on us and that's for better or for worse and that can be obviously from a nutritional perspective, from a flavor perspective, but also a community perspective. So families where


they are centered around big family dinners or Sunday lunches or Sunday dinners or food is always an occasion for them, it becomes ingrained into connection as well. And that's why, you know, going out for dinner with friends or going on a date over food or Christmas is so centered around food is because we also use food as a way to express love and to connect with our families. And so...


Again, that's why sometimes when you go to a family dinner and you say, no, I don't want to eat that food or yes, I do. Or you want to change your way of thinking about food. It can be quite confronting because you're also ruffling some feathers, not only in the family, but also in your deep ingrained beliefs. So all of those things kind of compile. So what does that mean for you in understanding your relationship with food? So it's really helpful as well to understand that there's.


no two stories are the same. And so in my interviews, I spoke with someone who had anorexia. And so her relationship with food was obviously very challenging. I also spoke with someone who never really even thought about food. It was literally just there. And when she was hungry, she ate what was in the pantry and just carried on with life. And she never gave it where I thought it about probably 23 hours a day. She probably thought about for about five minutes.


And so her perception of food was quite different. And for her and her family, it was never really that much of a thing. Her mom wasn't really a cook and didn't, they didn't have big dinners or family connections and stuff in that way. So she just never kind of grew up. It was just like, oh, when you're hungry, you eat and you carry on with your day. For someone else, I spoke to a lot of athletes. And so for them, it was part of their job. And it was, I need to eat the best food that I possibly can. It's an investment because


my body is my job, my performance on the day. So these were rugby players. My performance on the day is what gets me paid. I need to eat purely out of function. And so they would eat, yeah, it wasn't very exciting food, but they would eat high quality food and they would eat it pretty religiously. And it wasn't super exciting. It would be like, you know, bulk rice and chicken and things like that. But for them, they prioritized.


function and they prioritized quality because it was their job and it was their livelihood and digging deeper into that with them. That was how they were going to provide for their family. So food became a tool to help them, I guess, do their job better. And then other people, obviously it was all right connection and family. Other people had kind of stories of diet culture and thinking that food was good and bad. And it's just all, it's


really interesting to understand all of those different things. So when we start to look at your own relationship with food, like think back, what are some of those thoughts that you have? What are some of those beliefs that you have around food? Is it how you show love? Is it how you connect with your family? Is it bad? You know, if we grew up with parents who are from, you know, the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, you know, everything was.


was low fat and everything was low carb and everything was like diety. And so what, what sort of impact did that have on you as a, as a person? Do you then, did you then grow up believing that all carbs were bad? Did you grow up believing that you need to choose the diet options for everything? Or did you grow up thinking that the more cheese you add is, is better. And, you know, saying no to food is a sign of disrespect. So there's a whole lot of things that you can start to understand that right now might be sparking a whole lot of like.


Holy shit moments. That's why I'm wired the way I am when I look at food now. So for me, when I started to understand all of that, I just kind of absorbed all of this like a big sponge. And then I started to say, okay, there's lots of different ways that people view food. There's lots of different tools and techniques and diet cultures and stuff like that. And I then started to, I wanted to go on a bodybuilding journey. And so I wanted to


Jess (20:00.746)

I guess compete. I wanted to create the body that I wanted. And so I had to learn about food in a different way. And this one, I will say, like understanding how I kind of got to that point is almost a whole nother episode in terms of I initially just ate from a meal plan. I ate what I was told, but I really didn't understand like why I was eating those foods and how they were being adjusted. I also had a lot of hormonal challenges. So,


And I still do. And I, that's something that again, I'm also gonna share. There's a lot coming in these upcoming episodes. So I spend a lot of time reading a lot of things from Dr. Libby, a lot of things from other hormonal specialists and things about periods and what females need to have to support a healthy hormone function. I ate certain foods to help me get my period back and all those kinds of things. I guess I transitioned from.


Jess (20:54.122)

a dark culture way of life where again, I just did what I thought was right. I ate quote unquote clean foods and I tried to minimize what I was eating and then I would have, I wouldn't say like binge episodes, but I definitely then swung so far the other way because I was bloody hungry or because I didn't understand. And I was kind of piecing together all of these different things. So I then moved into


food industry and I have been in the food industry for the last 10 years working in marketing, working in sales, working in product development, a whole variety of different things. So I also now understand what drives consumers to make purchase decisions. And this is a whole industry built on this. Like the way that food products are positioned in the supermarket, the way that packaging reads, the colors of the packaging, the call-outs that are relevant,


Jess (21:49.722)

I've spent years and years talking to customers and consumers and testing, you know, brand messaging, understanding what happens when something's on end of aisle verse in the middle of the aisle verse online verse in a health store and what those messages are to customers. So where I'm getting to here is that the understanding your relationship from with food, sorry, and I guess unpacking.


Jess (22:17.538)

how your relationship with food is formed is so much more complex. It's where you live, it's how you grew up, it's the goals that you have in life and all of those kinds of things. So what I think is quite important to understand, if you are now in a space where you're like, okay, I'm sick of the diet culture, I want to just eat healthy food, but I also wanna know what to eat to achieve my goals. And remembering that food is such an important.


part of our day and our life and eating healthy food, like quote unquote healthy food is so important because as we see and as we know, like it is the thing that makes us function. And I think that people forget that at the very core, as much as it's all these other things for us, it's status, it's connection, it's blah, blah, blah. It is also the thing that fuels our day. And so when you think of it like that, it is important to make


Jess (23:14.354)

sensible food decisions. It's important to fuel it with, as we say, the premium fuel, not the crappy like shitty one. But understanding that that is different for every person is really important. Understanding how you get to that and learning what healthy looks like for you is a whole nother journey. And so identifying that, okay, what is my relationship with food right now? Do I understand what foods I need to be eating to


live my best life? Like yes, maybe no. Do I understand if I have any triggers around food? Is there things that I believe that I don't actually know if they're true or not and I just believe them because my parents told me unpacking these truths is a really nice way to then start a new journey of okay, what do I want my relationship with food to be? Do I want it to be something that is about love and connection?


It's about fueling my body in a healthy way. It's about fueling my mind. It's about creating a wonderful relationship with my body. What are the new stories that you want to have around food and around eating and around exercise, body image, all of these kinds of things. It's just a really important thing that I don't think anyone apart from probably me has ever really thought about. But now that I know it and understand it, when I talk to people, I continue to see


Jess (24:42.698)

It's something that we never really questioned because we never really like think too. But also we, quite a lot of us have got really negative relationships with food, which is now translated to negative relationships with our body, to negative relationships with our health. And it's now impacting, you know, our health and our happiness. And so for me, understanding this relationship with food is one of the key unlockers to health and happiness in life because food is wonderful and it's great. And you know, there's nothing better than having a


an amazing dinner with your friends and family, or there's nothing better than having a great meal and then having an incredible workout. It can do both of those things, but it can also trigger a whole lot of shame. It can trigger a whole lot of guilt and regret and a whole lot of these really uncomfortable emotions that we shouldn't have to go through and put ourselves through purely because we've never gone through this exercise of understanding our food story. So there's a few things that I want you to


I guess think about here and it's, okay, where, where did your food school? What is your food story right now? And this is something that you can like journal. You can have a think about, you can talk about with, you know, your friends and family and things like that, but what is your current story, um, around food? What is your current relationship with food and where did some of those things come from? Are they still true? Do you know where or why they're there?


Are they serving you? And if some of those questions are no, and the answers to those questions are no, then replace it with, okay, what would I like my relationship with food to look like? How would I like to make food decisions when it's lunchtime and I'm deciding what to eat? And where do I want that to be? And so that will give you some really interesting thoughts. And from there, you can then start to redesign it if you want to.


you can start to get more knowledge around, okay, yeah, maybe, maybe these things that I've inherited and these truths and these knowledge aren't actually serving me anymore and I'm ready to create a new slate. That's amazing. It doesn't need to be daunting and you can do it small steps at a time. And again, I've got podcasts coming up around how I, I guess, transitioned to a point where now I believe I have a really good relationship with food. Obviously I've spent like 10 years thinking about it, but you don't, you definitely don't need to do that.


But for me, I'm now in a place where I know what food makes me feel good. I know what I like to eat. I know what lights me up in terms of like things that are really yum and delicious to eat, but I also know what I need to eat to function well in mentally and physically. I then also know down to a level of detail, obviously, like how I can manipulate my food intake to achieve.


physical goals that I want to achieve with my sport. So for me it's obviously a whole lot more detailed than what kind of the average person needs to do. But if you are someone who struggles with dieting or you struggle with knowing what to eat to be have happy, healthy hormones, happy, healthy emotions, all those kinds of things, this is a really important place to start. So before I dive into, you know, calories and macros and micronutrients and all these kinds of things


Jess (28:06.626)

what I guess tools of where to start. I would start with understanding your relationship with food first. Understanding where you are, where you wanna be and from there you can then start to add tools to the tool belt around, yeah, understanding, okay, what do I do now? I don't wanna be in this diet spiral anymore. I don't wanna have a negative relationship with food. I don't wanna continue believing that there's good and bad foods and that I can't eat when I want or have to do it this way. You can create


a new reality around food. So I hope that that was really interesting for you. And as I said over the next couple of episodes, so I guess I no longer follow like a meal plan. I eat the foods that I want to eat when I want to eat them, but I do track and count my calories because for me that has been an absolute game changer in terms of, again, understanding food, understanding how I can eat in a way that supports my goals.


Tracking your food every single day, it's not for everybody, but I think again, it's an important skill for people to learn so that they can at least understand the function of food. So I've got an episode coming up on all of that stuff. And then also a few episodes on just how to be happy and healthy and how to make some smart decisions that don't feel like they're really challenging. But this is an episode that I've been wanting to do for a really long time. If there's any questions that you've got that come out of this.


We can't escape it anymore. And we also, it is something that really defines a lot of people in terms of, as I said, like that diet cult to that body image piece. If you struggle with body image, I would start by understanding your relationship with food. So I hope that that was interesting and helpful. It is so wonderful to be back on the podcast. I'm so excited. If you have any questions, definitely let me know.


I'll also do a quick little plug for my journal. So they are still online, they're still selling and I'm just getting so much amazing feedback from people. So if you would like a journal, you can buy a hardcover and a soft cover on my website. I'll pop all of the details in the show notes so that you can check them out. But that is an amazing way, if you are loving the content that I'm creating, that's a really cool way to support me. And you can.


Also do some journaling on your relationship with food if that's something that feels like it will serve you. So I am so excited. I'd love to hear your feedback on this episode. And if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise have a beautiful rest of your week.





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Jess Greene

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