Nourish to Heal

When Chronic Pain Changes Our Relationship with Food

Living with chronic pain changes nearly every part of life including how we eat. What once may have felt simple, like cooking a healthy meal or cleaning up the kitchen, can suddenly feel like an overwhelming task or even an impossible one.

Over time, these shifts can drastically impact our relationship with food. In this blog, we’ll explore why this happens, what it means for our physical and emotional health, and how we can start making gentle, harm-reduction-based changes that support healing not just for our bodies, but for our minds too.

When Cooking Becomes a Challenge

Standing for long periods, chopping vegetables, reaching into cabinets, washing dishes, all of these once routine kitchen activities can become painful, exhausting, or even unsafe for people living with chronic pain.

Many of our patients tell us:

“I want to eat healthy, but I physically can’t stand that long in the kitchen.”

We understand. Cooking can become a major project that requires hours of energy. Something many people with chronic pain simply don’t have. As a result, we often turn to whatever is easiest: frozen meals, microwaveable snacks, takeout, or drive-thru food.

And while these are convenient and sometimes necessary, they’re not always kind to our bodies, especially when we live with inflammation.

The Food-Inflammation Connection

Highly processed foods, fast food, and pre-packaged meals often contain:

Refined carbohydrates
Preservatives
Inflammatory oils
Added sugars
Artificial ingredients

These ingredients can spike blood sugar, disrupt hormones, and increase inflammation throughout the body. Over time, they can actually worsen chronic pain and contribute to weight gain, fatigue, and mood changes.

Specifically for women in perimenopause and menopause, these inflammatory foods can create even more imbalance in estrogen, cortisol, and insulin, which play key roles in how we experience pain, inflammation, and energy regulation.

This is why nutrition becomes even more important as we age, and especially if we’re managing chronic pain alongside hormonal changes.

Food, Mood, and Your Brain

It’s not just our joints and muscles that respond to what we eat, our brains do, too.

The foods we consume can influence the release of neurotransmitters like:

Serotonin (regulates mood, sleep, appetite, and pain)
Dopamine (affects motivation and focus)
GABA (helps calm the nervous system)

Here’s something many people don’t know; about 90% of serotonin is actually produced in the gut. That means your digestive health and what you feed your body can directly impact how you feel emotionally.

When we eat a diet filled with processed, inflammatory foods, it can disrupt our gut microbiome, which in turn can lead to:

Increased anxiety
Depressed mood
Brain fog
Sleep disturbances
Feeling fatigue/low energy

So when you find yourself feeling “off,” low-energy, or emotionally heavy, it might be more connected to your diet than you realize.

Gentle Nutrition for Real Life: A Harm Reduction Approach

Here at Mind and Motion Pain Therapy, we understand that not everyone can cook from scratch every day. That’s why we focus on realistic, harm-reduction-based nutrition for people living with chronic pain.

We don’t expect or encourage perfection.

Instead, we focus on small, doable shifts that reduce inflammatory load over time.

Every small change makes a difference. You don’t have to “eat clean” 100% of the time to feel better. The goal is not perfection, it’s progress.

Living Beyond Pain

469-354-0312

Nourish to Heal