how to deal with food guilt
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What is food guilt and why do I have it?
Food guilt can be described as the stress you experience over what you eat. It can happen when you feel like you lose control over what you’re eating when you’re eating and how it makes you feel. In today’s day and age of diet culture, we have created a very long list of foods that can trigger our food anxiety. If you’re eating in private, you might just text a friend and tell them how gross you feel and how guilty you are. If you’re eating in public, you might be apologizing after every bite or expressing how disgusted you are with yourself. But why do we do this? Why do we experience so much guilt around food?
Food guilt can lead to a variety of issues, including emotional eating and disordered eating. We believe that we just aren’t trying hard enough, and become so hard on ourselves when we think we “failed” at our eating. We put labels on our food, we label them as “good” or “bad”, and if we are unable to resist our “bad” foods we’ve failed.
This restriction can be the root of our issue, it’s human nature to naturally want something more when we tell ourselves we can’t have it. Research has shown that one of the biggest behaviours that contribute to binge eating is restriction. When you allow yourself to eat whatever you want, you tell it that it has access to all foods at all times, and when food is available you no longer get intense food cravings. Those food cravings can come from triggering our body’s natural response to restriction — leaving us hyper-focused on getting that food.
What can I do to get rid of food guilt?
Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat and getting rid of all your rules around food will help free you from food guilt. You don’t need to “work for it” or “earn” your food, your body needs and deserves to be nourished.
Once you give yourself unconditional permission to eat (and not evaluate food based on its perceived health values), you can truly ask yourself: Do I really want to eat this? And if the answer is yes, you truly do want what you are craving, then allow yourself to eat it without regret or guilt.
Top tips:
Honour your biological hunger.
This can be difficult and frustrating, but only if you don’t trust your body’s own hunger cues or are unaware of them. If you ignore your hunger cues, you may end up too hungry and overeat later on. Practice mindful eating and ask yourself to rate your hunger on a scale of 1 to 10 — if you chose to ignore your hunger cues when you’re feeling a level 10 hunger, you may overeat when your next meal comes along.
Learn to tell the difference between biological hunger and emotional hunger.
Are you struggling to tell the difference between genuine hunger and emotional? Take a moment and reflect on how you’re feeling — are you actually hungry or are you bored? Upset? Angry? Another way of being able to tell is when the food doesn’t even taste good but you eat it anyway, or you’re full but you continue to eat anyways.
Don’t hold judgment towards your food choices.
What you eat doesn’t define who you are — don’t beat yourself up about enjoying one of your favourite foods.
Question your rules around food.
For instance, if you are telling yourself you don’t need that cookie after a meal — reflect and consider if you do eat that cookie, will you be satisfied and not be haunted by that cookie craving for the rest of the day? If you ignore your craving and tell yourself you don’t need it, you might just end up eating a whole box of cookies later on.
Acknowledge your food fears and put them into context.
Someone who has chronically dieted or restricted their eating might be telling themselves, “if I start eating sweets, I won’t be able to stop”. However, food habituation has shown that the more a person is exposed to and allowed to eat a certain food — the more desirable it becomes. When dieters have not experienced the effects of food habituation, they stress about not being to control themselves around a certain food.
Learn from your experiences.
If you feel horrible after a long day of work, then coming home and devouring an entire pizza — are you able to recognize the factors that contributed to this? Did you ignore a craving earlier on in the day? Did you go too long without eating? Were you too stressed, which led to emotional hunger? Once you reflect on the situation and the factors that contributed to it, you can learn the triggers that lead you to these negative experiences with food.
Something interesting you can try:
Acknowledge the foods that you are craving and write them down. Then check off any of the foods you allow yourself to enjoy, and circle the ones that you do not. Select one of your “off-limit” foods and give yourself permission to enjoy it. Then go to the store and purchase it, or order it from a restaurant. Check-in with yourself and see how you feel while eating this food, does it taste as good as you imagined? If you truly do really love then give yourself permission to continue buying it or ordering it. Make sure you have enough access to the item so that your body knows if you really want it you have access to it (if that seems too intimidating then tell yourself you can go to a restaurant and order it whenever you want).