If you had told me a few years ago, back when I weighed over 400 pounds and was staring down the barrel of bariatric surgery, that I would one day write a blog post about “grief” and food, I probably would have laughed. Or cried. Or, more likely, gone and found a sleeve of cookies to take the edge off.
But here we are.
When people find out I’ve lost over 200 pounds and kept it off with a low-carb, ketogenic lifestyle, they almost always ask the same thing: “Amy, what foods do you miss the most?”
My answer usually surprises them. I don’t really miss any one specific food. Sure, I occasionally get cravings or want a particular flavor profile, but with a little kitchen creativity and some work, I can almost always recreate a delicious, low-carb version of it.
No, what I actually miss, and what I had to grieve, was something very different: I miss being able to eat with total, reckless abandon. I miss the ability to just not pay attention. And that has absolutely nothing to do with food, diets, macros or nutrition, and everything to do with stuffing myself.
It’s about using food rather than eating food.
“Using” Food vs. Eating Food
Food grief is the quiet, heavy realization that happens when you finally see your relationship with food for what it actually is,
For fifty years, I used food as a magical salve for every problem…to mop up my tears, to celebrate my joys. I used it to fill every empty, aching space in my heart that needed filling. Food was my comfort, my constant companion, and the most reliable dopamine hit.
For me, and for so many of us who have used food to cope, this is where the wires get crossed. When I look at a single, solitary cookie, my brain doesn’t see a treat; it immediately screams, “That’s not enough.” I want the endless, bottomless, uninterrupted experience of eating them, and that has nothing to do with any single cookie.
One cookie means I still have to be present. Wanting “all the cookies” is not about taste or physical hunger; it is a desperate search for the ultimate, numbing, off switch. Acknowledging that one will never be enough, and that it is the endless quantity I’m actually craving was the hardest, most freeing truth of all.
If my mental response to having one cookie is that I want all the cookies in the whole world, then the answer was never in the one cookie.
The Craving for Quantity
Cravings for lots of food, for massive quantities of food, aren’t actually about physical hunger at all. They are about a desperate search for safety and grounding. When we crave “big” food, we aren’t looking for sustenance; we are looking for that heavy, numbing fullness that acts like a physical anchor when our emotions are swirling out of control. We are looking to be tethered in a world where many times we may feel out of control and unmoored.
It’s the “food coma” we are chasing, when the brain finally quietens down, and we get a temporary break from our anxiety, overwhelm, stress, or sadness.
Recognizing that the craving for quantity is actually just a craving for comfort was a massive breakthrough, and allowed me to start asking, “What am I really after in this moment?”
Facing an Uncomfortable Emotional Reality
When you transition to a low-carb lifestyle, something transformational happens: physical hunger quiets down. The constant, nagging bio-chemical driving force to eat every two hours dissipates, but when that physical noise clears, you are left standing face-to-face with the emotional reality, and suddenly, you don’t have your primary coping mechanism anymore.
You can’t just numb out with a sleeve of cookies or a box of pizza (or your “drug” of choice). You have to actually feel your feelings.
That is where the grief lives. It’s mourning the loss of an old friend, even if that friend was slowly killing you.
If you are on this journey and feeling a sudden sense of sadness, please know you are not broken, and you are not alone. It is okay to grieve. Acknowledge the loss, feel the feelings, and then take a step forward, because on the other side of that grief isn’t deprivation, it’s freedom.
And that freedom? It is the most beautiful, unexpected plot twist of this entire journey. For so long, I thought “food freedom” meant being able to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, without consequence. But true food freedom is actually the exact opposite. It is the peace of no longer being controlled by the next meal, the next craving, or the next emotional storm. It’s seeing food and most of the time, experiencing it for what it truly is, fuel and nourishment, rather than a lifeline.
When you finally allow yourself to walk through the fire of that grief, you emerge on the other side lighter in every single way. Something shifts, and you realize that using food wasn’t actually preventing your feelings, it was merely kicking the can down the road and until they popped up again, demanding to be felt.
