Eating disorders are often thought about in terms of behaviors around food: eating too much, not eating enough, purging after eating. But thoughts about food are an equally significant, if less discussed, part of these illnesses. While food-related thoughts look different from person to person, it’s quite common for those struggling with eating disorders to be abnormally preoccupied with food and eating. In this article, we’ll take a close look at food obsession in eating disorders, including why it occurs, what conditions it’s associated with, how it’s addressed, and more.

What does food obsession look like?

In the most general terms, food obsession is just what it sounds like—when a person can’t stop thinking about food—but it can manifest in a number of different ways.

On a psychological level, food obsession can mean that thoughts about food or eating take over a person’s brain space. Research shows that it’s common for people with eating disorders to become preoccupied with food, experiencing constant and excessive thoughts to the extent that it impairs daily functioning. Food obsession can also affect memory and cognition, with one study showing that people with anorexia are more likely to remember food-related words than those without anorexia.

Constantly thinking about food can also have behavioral ramifications. People with eating disorders tend to want to be around food, even if they’re not eating it. That might look like making food for others without having any, reading cookbooks, watching food shows on TV, or being excessively interested in what other people are eating.

“The experience of food obsession can be nuanced and vary from person to person,” says Jonathan Levine, LCSW, therapy lead at Equip. “But constant thoughts of food, such as: what (not) to eat, when (not) to eat, where (not) to eat and around whom, and what’s ‘safe’ to eat are all examples of how obsessive thinking can show up. These obsessive thoughts can also lead to obsessive behaviors, like only eating certain foods, in certain places, around certain people, at certain times of day.”

What causes food obsession in eating disorders?

So why is it so common for people with eating disorders to become preoccupied with food? There are a few possible explanations, but at its core, food obsession is a result of the eating disorder hijacking a person’s mind. “Food becomes the focal point of one’s life when an eating disorder is loud and in control,” explains Levine.

To dive deeper into how this works, let’s unpack two of the main drivers of food obsession in eating disorders: restriction and unhelpful coping strategies.

The role of restriction in food obsession

It’s a simple fact that restricting food makes you think about food more. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense: when you don’t let yourself eat, your body believes you’re starving and kicks into survival mode. It will do whatever it takes to get the energy it needs—and one way it does this is by sounding an alarm bell in the form of constant thoughts about food. These thoughts are a survival mechanism, meant to motivate you to find the fuel necessary to stay alive.

“If you spend all of your time thinking of what to eat without letting yourself eat and receive adequate nutrition and pleasure, your brain will enter a state of vigilance around food and continue that mindset of avoidance and restriction while the body fights back to get the energy it needs,” says Levine. “Indeed, your body will fight to get the nutrients it needs by increasing thoughts of food to maintain homeostasis and safety.”

There’s a significant body of research backing up this idea. Perhaps most well-known is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, a study in the 1940s in which hundreds of healthy men were put on a semi-starvation diet in order to measure and monitor how it affected their physical and psychological health. One key takeaway was that their restrictive diet led to extreme preoccupation with food. The men talked about food with one another, dreamt about food, began reading cookbooks and collecting recipes, and reported excessive thoughts about food and eating.

Since then, there have been multiple other studies confirming these findings. Research has shown that both starvation and self-imposed diets result in preoccupation with food and eating and that dieting can lead to increased responsiveness to food signals and a heightened desire for food. One study looking at both dieters and binge eaters found that among both groups, higher levels of dietary restraint were associated with greater preoccupation with food and eating.

Food obsession as a coping mechanism

But food obsession can be a symptom even for those who aren’t in a state of restriction. For many people with eating disorders, food is a coping mechanism, a means of escape or control or both. Thoughts about food—whether it’s planning a binge hours in advance, obsessing over what they just ate, or painstakingly tracking macros—can be a way to escape distressing emotions, or to feel a sense of control over a chaotic situation.

What eating disorders are associated with food obsession?

While people with any eating disorder diagnosis could have excessive thoughts about food, Levine says that food obsession tends to be associated with binge eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, and anorexia nervosa. In one study, those with anorexia and bulimia had higher levels of food preoccupation than those with BED, but people with all three eating disorders had more thoughts about food than people without eating disorders.

Could food obsession be a sign of something besides an eating disorder?

Constantly thinking about food isn’t always a sign of an eating disorder. People could also experience food obsession for other reasons, such as:

• Food insecurity
• Nutritional deficiencies
• Dieting or restrictive eating habits that fall outside of a diagnosable eating disorder

Negative consequences and risks of food obsession

Excessive food-related thoughts can have a significant negative impact on your daily functioning, ability to think clearly, and overall well-being.

In the Minnesota Starvation experiment, for example, the subjects showed impaired cognitive abilities and depressed mood across the board. In fact, several subjects were forced to withdraw from university because they became unable to concentrate and lacked the motivation to attend class. A different study found that “successful” dieters (i.e., people who restricted their eating in the presence of food) performed badly on a simple task, whereas “unsuccessful” dieters (those who ate their fill) performed very well. When the “successful” dieters let go of their diets, they did a good job on the task, suggesting that thoughts about dieting and food were taking up too much space to allow them to function to the best of their ability.

And according to still more research, if you have restrictive rules around eating, it can lead to worse cognitive performance even after you’ve eaten: according to one study, dieters performed worse on a memory task than non-dieters both before and after eating. The researchers theorize that this is because before eating food they were experiencing obsession due to food restriction, and after eating, they were distracted by guilt and stress about what they’d eaten.

Beyond the toll it takes on mental performance, constantly thinking about food can have other negative impacts on your life. “If you’re cutting out activities, people, or plans, or changing your lifestyle to ensure you’re able to meet the eating disorder’s desires related to food obsession, then you’re losing parts of yourself and parts of your life to that obsession,” says Levine. “We want to make sure we have balance in our life to get all of our needs met, and maintaining an obsession makes that extremely difficult, if not impossible.”

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How is food obsession addressed in eating disorder treatment?

“It depends on the diagnosis, a person’s age, and if they need to restore weight to nourish their brain,” says Levine. “But generally speaking, we challenge avoidance by normalizing what has become abnormal. For example, if someone is obsessed with either never eating cake or eating cake in what feels like an uncontrollable manner, we’ll work to normalize the food by asking them to eat cake regularly. It’s hard to obsess over normal, the routine, the baseline, so if we make something feel normal by experiencing it regularly, that will decrease the obsession in time.”

In a lot of cases, food obsession goes away on its own during the course of eating disorder treatment. That’s because as you become renourished and adopt regular eating habits, the restriction and other disordered eating patterns that were fueling the food obsession go away. Patients also learn healthy coping strategies that they can use rather than turning to thoughts about food to manage emotions.

What to do if you or a loved one is struggling with food obsession

If you find that you can’t stop thinking about food, or are worried that a loved one is experiencing food obsession, it could signal an eating disorder. And even if an eating disorder isn’t the underlying cause, food obsession can have a very real negative impact on your mental and physical health, as well as your life. Either way, it’s important to reach out to a professional for support. Talk with your doctor or a trusted mental health professional, or consider making an appointment with an eating disorder-informed dietitian. You can also schedule a consultation with the Equip team to talk through your concerns and what treatment options are available.