🍕 Can't Stop Thinking About Food? Psychotherapist Explains How to Retrain Your Brain

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]If you find yourself constantly thinking about food, it can be pretty intrusive.

[00:00:05]That's time and energy and mental space that you would probably prefer to be dedicating to something else in your life.

[00:00:12]Problem is when it's something that you struggled with for years, it feels like it is such a ingrained habit and pattern that it's it's like it's who you are now. I'm a psychotherapist and I work with people to change their psychology around food. I've done it myself and I've seen other people make changes, too. So, I am very hopeful about what we can do about this.

[00:00:31]We do know that some of our food thoughts is biologically driven, so I will touch on that, but this video is about the psychological part of these food thoughts. And I'm going to share with you some specific methods and techniques that you can put into practice to start changing your psychology around food so that you're not obsessing about it all the time. So, let's dive in.

[00:00:53]So, firstly, where do these food thoughts come from? Well, we know that there is a biological element and this can include things like hunger, your hormones, your blood sugar. So, if you are actively restricting at this time and you're hoping that these techniques are going to help get rid of those food thoughts, they may not work because our appetite is so powerful, it's biologically driven. It is tied in with our psychology, but it's learning like how those two interact and for each person, it can look slightly different.

[00:01:23]We've seen with the GLP-1s that people often report a reduction in food thoughts or what we now call food noise.

[00:01:30]Some of my clients have gone down the GLP-1 route and find themselves still thinking about food. It's changed flavor a little bit because they're not having to battle with their hunger or the physiology so much, but they still find themselves obsessing because they're in these loops of thinking around food where so much of their mental real estate and their sense of their identity has been tied up in their relationship with food or their struggles with food that they're still obsessing about whether they're eating right. They then start worrying about the timing of their meals with the GLP-1s. Are they eating enough protein? Those food rules and the food morality doesn't automatically disappear when someone's on GLP-1s. And what this shows us is that although our appetite does affect our thoughts, our thoughts and our appetite is also separate. They overlap and they're separation. And an interesting example of this is that when um males have undergone chemical castration because sometimes they'll do it voluntarily because they're distressed at the sexual thoughts that they have, what they find is whilst the physical ability to carry out those acts has been stopped by the chemical castration, they still find themselves preoccupied with a lot of the sexual thoughts that they were thinking about before. So, a little bit like with the GLP-1s, it reduces the distress of acting on some of these thoughts, but doesn't necessarily get rid of them. So, from a psychological perspective, where are these thoughts coming from? Well, some of them are automated loops. You've thought them so many times in the past that you have neural networks in your brain that are dedicated to these particular thoughts around food. If you're someone who's struggled with this stuff, particularly around body image or weight as well, and your self-worth has become tied up in how you're eating, your brain now has learned that it is so important to think about this stuff constantly because how you are eating, what you are and aren't eating is then going to dictate the experience you have of being you. And that's a pretty big thing. So, of course your brain is then going to pay a lot of attention to food.

[00:03:40]And it may be helpful to sometimes think about these types of psychological food thoughts as being like intrusive thoughts.

[00:03:48]So, similar to what we see in OCD, I'm not saying they are OCD, but there's a similar mechanism going on here.

[00:03:54]Is that when we have a thought and we have an emotional reaction to that thought, the stronger the emotional reaction, the more the brain flags that thought as important.

[00:04:06]So, if someone has a baby, this is a common one, and in their postnatal stage, they have a thought about harming their baby. And they are so horrified that they could possibly think about harming their baby that they worry about what that thought means.

[00:04:21]Now, because there's such a strong emotional reaction to the thought, the thought keeps coming up. The brain is like, "Whoa, there's something going on here that we have to pay attention to."

[00:04:30]And now they can't stop thinking about it. A similar thing can be happening with food. When you are having an emotional reaction to those thoughts, your brain keeps going, "This is important. We need to keep coming back to this. We need to keep coming back to this. No, we don't want to think about that other thing over here because this is where the emotional energy is." So, what this means that in order to actually change the thoughts, this is not about willpower or pushing back or even distraction techniques. I mean, you can try distraction techniques if they help, but this is about a rewiring, and that happens through changing the way that we react to the thought.

[00:05:08]How many times are you consciously choosing what you're thinking about?

[00:05:14]It's pretty rare, right? Most of the time it's like thoughts are happening to us. They arrive, we react, we get in this entanglement with them, and they are a big part of what dictates our experience, our behaviors, and our choices.

[00:05:28]Your reaction to these thoughts is everything.

[00:05:32]Cuz it is your reaction that's either going to feed this thought and make it stronger or starve the thought and make it weaker. So, ask yourself now, how do you react once you realize you started thinking about food?

[00:05:46]Chances are there's some kind of contraction, there's a tension that happens, there's a resistance. Oh, no.

[00:05:52]I don't want to be think I don't want to do this thing that I've started thinking about. Or maybe it's the opposite, maybe you get excited when you started thinking about it. Either way, there is a strong emotional response. And that emotional response has become so automatic, you're not choosing your response either. That's become part of this automated thought link, and we need to break it. And there are a few ways in this video that I'm going to talk about how to do that.

[00:06:16]I'm going to talk about food neutrality, curiosity, cognitive diffusion. I'll explain what that is in a minute.

[00:06:24]Enthusiasm, where does that fit in? And reverse psychology. All of these five things, independently and in combination, can transform this experience you're having of these thoughts. So, let's look at each one a bit more closely.

[00:06:39]So, food neutrality. So, food neutrality is about seeing food as morally neutral.

[00:06:45]It's not saying all food is nutritionally equal. There is still a place for nutrition. Where food morality becomes problematic is when you see foods as bad, and the more bad you see them, and the more bad you feel about yourself when you eat them.

[00:07:02]Now, when you crave them and you want them, it can trigger off like a threat response in the body. There's fear that's going on because you're going to feel so bad about yourself if you eat them. These foods are so bad for you.

[00:07:13]You are so out of control around these foods. Do you see how this feeds the negative emotional charge around these foods? Something that really worked for me was actually focusing on how I'm eating rather than what I'm eating. So, the how was wanting to eat in a calm emotional state, so doing my best around that. And it was prioritizing satisfaction.

[00:07:36]Because when I felt more calm and regulated, I made more regulated decisions. So, I'll often say regulated people make more regulated decisions.

[00:07:48]When you're somebody who struggles with food obsession, there's so much emotion and stress going on around it as well that you struggle to make decisions.

[00:07:56]Though that emotional charge messes up the decision-making process.

[00:08:02]So, when I took the focus off of good foods and bad foods and I focused on like the way I wanted to feel, I wanted to feel regulated, I wanted to feel satisfied, when that was my North Star, my decisions just I wanted more of a variety of food. The more those foods were forbidden and bad, the higher my cravings were for them. And maybe that's not true for everyone, but this is something to test out for yourself. Now, food neutrality, because it involves changing our attitude towards certain foods, is that it does take time. And so, it takes being able to challenge some of those judgments that you have.

[00:08:38]This is not a quick one. This one tends to more underpin some of the other things that I'm about to talk about. So, let's move on to curiosity.

[00:08:46]How does curiosity help? How does that change anything?

[00:08:50]Well, often when we're having an experience of ourselves that we don't like, we tend to go in one of two directions.

[00:08:57]We either seek to try and understand the experience or why we're doing the thing that we don't like doing, or we move to condemnation.

[00:09:06]What tends to happen is when you struggled with the same thing over and over again, most of us end up in condemnation and self-judgment. Just constantly berating ourselves and saying that we should just be trying harder and doing better. But the problem is once you condemn, once you have decided, "I'm just someone who lacks willpower. I'm someone who's out of control around food. I'm greedy." And whatever it is your particular story is, the minute you just decided that that is true, you have shut down any possibility of something new or a different outcome occurring.

[00:09:39]Curiosity is that coming in that gentle questioning of what might actually be going on, genuinely wanting to understand. Because when we use force to try to resist an urge, a craving, whatever it might be, we tend to make it worse.

[00:09:56]Which is why these food thoughts sometimes start off like a niggle, and then you're resisting and you're pushing back and they just get like louder and they go on and on and they wear you down. It's because that resistance itself like feeds the thought. When we are on autopilot, when we are in our habit brain, we are operating from our basal ganglia.

[00:10:17]And when we are curious, when we ask ourselves good, like genuinely curiosity-led questions, we switch on the prefrontal cortex.

[00:10:27]When we fight and we're just in our automated thinking about this, we are just stuck there in our lower brain, unable to access anything new. So, asking yourself questions, what could be going on for me? Like, what is this thought trying to do for me? Often people see their food issues, their struggle with food as like the enemy.

[00:10:45]Like maybe they think their brain is the enemy, or they think food is the enemy, but they feel like they're in a battle with something.

[00:10:52]But a lot of the time, the reason why you're having so many thoughts about food is because at some point your brain learned that it was very important to think about these things. So, therefore, they're trying to help, even if they're not. They're trying to. So, when we think of this as we are trying to resolve our relationship with this benevolent force that's trying to help, that's going to change the enemy to this.

[00:11:20]Any of you who are familiar with acceptance and commitment therapy might have already heard of cognitive diffusion.

[00:11:27]And the philosophy behind it is that thoughts on their own are just thoughts.

[00:11:32]They're just thoughts. They don't have any meaning. They don't have any power.

[00:11:36]But what we do as human beings is we fuse with our thoughts. So, we have the thought and we load meaning on it. We identify with it. We think it's very, very important. Now that we are fused with the thought, we've given the thought power.

[00:11:50]So, cognitive defusion is about defusing ourselves from the thought. And there's a few techniques that they talk about of how to do this. One is labeling. So, you label that you are having a thought.

[00:12:03]Often we don't think of it as having a thought. We think that our thoughts are information coming to us that are telling us things that are already true.

[00:12:12]So, when we label it, it's like, I am having a thought of Now, the problem isn't the situation of Oh, no, what am I going to do about the food?

[00:12:20]The the um situation at hand is, Hmm, what am I going to do with this thought?

[00:12:26]How do I want to respond to it? And along a similar vein, they talk about naming the story. So, we have You'll have areas in your life and times and situations where food thoughts are likely to be louder.

[00:12:38]And when all these things are in context, you have this experience, that's the story.

[00:12:43]So, an example could be I know, let's say you get a train home from work. And every time you get the train, you buy a load of food to eat on the train.

[00:12:51]So, when you have the thought you're going to go to the train station, you're going to have the thought about, Hmm, I'm going to go and get that food that I always get. The story is, Well, of course my brain's thinking about the food because I normally get on the train and I have the food. That's the whole story that's going on here. So, when my brain thinks about the food, if I resist and I stress out about that, I'm going to fall into my automatic thinking and I'm just going to grab the food. Versus naming the story, I might think of it more as like naming your pattern. You can see, Oh, this is a pattern playing out as opposed to this is some something about me where this horrible part of me comes out in these moments.

[00:13:31]For those of you who are good at visualizing, there are visualization techniques you can do. They don't work for me cuz I have aphantasia and I just can't visualize, but one of them that ACT suggests is the sending it down the stream.

[00:13:44]So you that you label the thought, in your mind you pop the thought on a leaf, and you watch the thought float away from you.

[00:13:51]For people who like visualizing, this can be really effective. It's not for everyone.

[00:13:57]Just like the other technique of talking to yourself in a silly voice. Again, some people love this kind of thing. The idea is again, if you catch the thought and you change that voice into I don't know, some of the common ones are like Bart Simpson or Kermit the Frog, that you are putting a different energy on it. You are diffusing from the thought and you are in control of shifting the thought into something different. You're not battling with the thought, you're changing the tone of it in order to have a different reaction to it. And it may sound counterintuitive, but another thing that cognitive diffusion suggests is thanking your mind.

[00:14:37]Like I said before, if this is a benevolent force, your mind thinks that this is really important stuff because it's become so important to you.

[00:14:45]So it's in a loop with it, but it's trying to help. It's trying to present you with what it thinks is important.

[00:14:52]So when you catch the thought and you label the thought or you name the pattern, whatever it might be, you can then say, "Oh, thank you, mind. You're just trying to help me out here."

[00:15:02]Do you see how less scary that is and how you take the power away from the thought itself that feels so true normally?

[00:15:10]So I'm a big fan of reverse psychology because it works well for me. I have a bias towards it because I have a part of me that is very rebellious and I can rebel against things that are for my own good.

[00:15:23]Reverse psychology can work pretty well, and the enthusiasm is also a type of reverse psychology.

[00:15:29]So, what it what it looks like is you are expecting the thought to come. You know you're somebody that has these thoughts, they come regularly, they become obsessions at time. So, you you will know the certain situations or times, whenever it might be, when these thoughts are likely to pay you a visit.

[00:15:47]And so, when they come along, the idea is to be pleased that they're there.

[00:15:52]Because in order to change this stuff, in order to change your wiring in your brain around food and shift your psychology, you need the opportunity to practice responding differently. So, therefore, when the thought arrives, brilliant. Great, this is a chance for me to practice some of the things that I've learned in this video. It's also completely disarming to the energy of the thought when you're glad it's arrived. Cuz normally, you're not glad it's arrived at all. The thought might make you feel anxious or despairing or frustrated or whatever it might be, but it certainly not associated with positive emotions.

[00:16:27]The important thing when you are trying to do this kind of work is the expecting of the thoughts. Because if those thoughts creep up on you when you are somewhere else, you're you know, maybe you're watching TV or you're distracted, whatever it might be, chances are they will hook you, and you'll end up fusing with the thought before you've even realized you have.

[00:16:47]So, that's why the expectation is so important. And because these thoughts, they feed on your resistance, they feed on your stress, the way to change them is to change that response to them. So, that involves a reframe, it involves a shift in perspective on how you look at what these thoughts are.

[00:17:07]I also like finding where those cravings and those urges are in your body. So, for me, like, my binge urge was right here, sort of the bottom of my throat, not quite in my throat, not quite in my chest, but it felt like pressure here.

[00:17:21]And so some of the things that I would be practicing is when that urge came, was connecting with what the sensation was in my body.

[00:17:30]And then, here's where the reverse psychology comes in.

[00:17:33]You try to make it worse.

[00:17:36]So wherever you feel your cravings, your urges, or however you think about them, if you find what's going on in your body, chances are, even though it might not feel great, and it might feel a bit physically uncomfortable, at the sensation level, it's normally not too bad. It's normally the mind that is spiraling and making things worse.

[00:17:55]So the reverse psychology element, we go to it and we try and make that feeling, we try and make it feel worse, we try and make it feel bigger. A lot of people find it's actually really hard to do, because when we make a conscious choice to move towards something like that that previously we've labeled as unwanted or scary, it signals safety in our nervous system. We wouldn't be moving towards this if it wasn't safe. So we feel safer to do it.

[00:18:20]And then that feeling of safety, notice what happens to the urges. But just because you might be expecting the urges or the cravings to reduce, it's really important that you go into it with a genuine desire to see if you can make it bigger. Cuz if you're going in with like, "Oh, it's supposed to get less, it's supposed to get less." You're not really trying to make the feeling bigger, so it might not work as well.

[00:18:44]Ultimately, what we are trying to do here is recognize these old loops of thinking and feeling around food, and creating some new loops.

[00:18:53]But it's not about just creating new loops. When we change how we react to the old loops, that's what helps us to create the new ones.

[00:19:01]So the old loop would probably look something like the thought arrives, and there's some kind of contraction or tension or bracing against There's resistance to the thought, right? You don't want it.

[00:19:12]But your brain is now flagged, well this must be important cuz we're having a reaction here. So it starts to obsess with what to do with this thought. And then when that builds and builds, eventually you just tip over into your usual compulsive behaviors or habits on the other side of it.

[00:19:26]Whereas with the new thought, it's the new loop rather, it's not about a new thought to begin with. The thought arise, same thought as always, but you were expecting this to be happening. And you were like, you're like, of course, of course this thought is here.

[00:19:39]Brilliant, here's an opportunity to different. And that's when you can try things like the diffusion techniques or being curious or the softening around it or the trying to make it bigger, but it is an intentional move towards it. It's a non-resistance to it. And when we do that, when we have changed the energy of it, that's what opens up the possibility of other choices.

[00:20:02]And so often people use things like willpower or distractions to try and get rid of these thoughts.

[00:20:08]But willpower often involves like the resistance. So we're actually making it worse. The thing you're trying to do to make your thoughts easier may actually be making them harder.

[00:20:18]So this is about rewiring our brain.

[00:20:20]It's about changing our neural networks.

[00:20:22]And we have brains that are able to do that. For as long as you are still capable of learning anything new, if you learned a new word the other day that you hadn't heard before and you can remember that, your brain is capable of making new neural pathways. And when we think of it like this as well, I think one of the reasons why people love hearing this stuff spoken about in sort of neurology and neuroscience language is because it depersonalizes it. It doesn't make it about you as a person, it's some kind of moral or personal failing that you have that this is a struggle for you. Now you may be thinking, gosh, this sounds like a lot.

[00:20:57]It sounds like a lot of hard work to change these automated thoughts.

[00:21:02]I'm not going to lie, it takes intention. It does take effort and it does take the willingness to return to it. However, could it be possible that the process of change itself could be a satisfying and maybe even an enjoyable one?

[00:21:19]Each time you have a new experience, like a different outcome or just a different experience of your thoughts, you did something different, you stepped out of your automated patterns, celebrate yourself.

[00:21:32]Every one time you do it because that celebration, that reinforcement of emotion deliberately and intentionally is what helps to cement some of these changes.

[00:21:42]If you're someone you're waiting till I need to wait till I've got this stuff all figured out, till I'm completely fixed, my body looks exactly how I want it to look, and then I'll feel good about myself.

[00:21:53]That that's going to disrupt the process. The process itself there needs to be some level of personal satisfaction in it to keep you going.

[00:22:02]And I think this is why some people sort of start on the recovery path, and then when they become disheartened, there isn't the motivation to keep going with this stuff. And that's why every little win needs to be paid attention to. Maybe even note them down somewhere so that you can go back to it on a day where you feel like you've made no progress at all. And if you're wondering where to start with this stuff, I really recommend this video here I'm going to put on the screen cuz this is about getting really clear about what it is that you're trying to create. Cuz yes, we want to dismantle the old, but we're also looking at building the new. And having that very clear in your mind will really help you on this process as well.

[00:22:38]So if you would like to know more about my groups and upcoming workshops, you can check out the links below, join my mailing list. I hope this was helpful.

[00:22:46]Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next video.