Food for Thought
I love food! Seriously, I really enjoy eating. But I definitely haven’t always felt like that. Beginning in high school, when I first started to worry about my weight, food gradually became a constant obsession, something I was always thinking about—and not in a good way.
There’s happy food-thinking, as in Wow, I’m so excited to get my favorite chicken parmesan from the Italian restaurant I’m going to tonight, I’ve been thinking about it all day, and then there’s obsessive food-thinking, as in I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner all day because I need to make sure it fits in with my calorie and macro counts and I’m daydreaming about all kinds of delicious things that I can’t possibly eat. I’ve been in that second camp more times than I’d care to think about. When you’re obsessing about your food intake all day, eating is no longer an enjoyable part of life. Even if you have something tasty, you might feel guilty about it soon after—or at least that’s what often happened to me.
In the past few months, I’ve made it my goal to truly enjoy eating again. I want to love food [that part has definitely been achieved], and I want to not feel any guilty about eating any of it. I’ve heard some people make arguments along these lines: feeling guilty about food is a necessary part of eating because it’s how the body regulates itself so you know what you should and shouldn’t have. Does that sounds suspect to anyone else? It certainly does to me. Engaging in food guilty has never helped me out at all.
As a naturally thicker young woman growing up in the Instagram age, you’d better believe I’ve tried a ridiculous number of diet trends and quick weight loss strategies that I saw in my social media feeds [down with #fitspo]. Every diet labels certain types of food as “bad” or “off-limits,” and those become the objects of guilt if you do indulge. For me, when I tell myself that I can’t have a certain item, that rule just makes me want it more [call me a rebel with an authority problem], and I inevitably cave and binge eat that item. And feel guilty. But the guilt doesn’t prevent me from repeating that same cycle after a period of intense restriction and a return to the intense craving for everything that I “can’t” have.
The first diet that I tried was Atkins, or at least my own version of what I thought Atkins was, which involved limiting myself to 10g net carbs per day—so basically I mainly ate deli meat and cheese and eggs for two weeks. Did I lose weight initially? Yes. But I also gained it all back as soon as I had one piece of Easter candy [oh boy, do I remember the sweet deliciousness of that Lindt chocolate bunny] and then descended into a deep hole of eating literally any and all carbs for a week after that. I’ve tried keto, juice cleanses, extreme calorie restriction, tea detoxes—you get the gist. They all seem like they work for a little while but then suddenly you “crack” and succumb to the totally natural desire to eat the things you actually enjoy. And then you feel bad about yourself.
I’ve been experimenting with graphics lately, so here’s a little depiction of what I’m talking about [thanks, PowerPoint!]:
The lesson I finally learned from this was that labeling certain foods as bad and feeling guilty about eating them was not an effective or sustainable way for me to reach my fitness goals. Integrating intuitive eating practices into my life has been my way of eating mindfully in a way that doesn’t feel restrictive. I feel that I do eat “whatever I want”—ice cream [did you guys know ice cream is my favorite dessert?!?], pasta, salad, English muffins with peanut butter... basically all of the good things in life. I made another graphic about intuitive eating to parallel the one above and to show how my food attitudes changed under this mindset:
It’s a pretty big jump between these ways of thinking. So how did I get here? There’s no step-by-step manual, and I think it’s a different process for every person. That said, I can tell you guys that nominally “de-guilting” food was a huge part of finding food happiness for me. If you had asked me a year or two ago what my guilty pleasures were, I would have happily given you this list:
Ice cream
Ice cream
Ice cream
Chocolate chip cookies
Ice cream
Today, I choose not to feel guilty about eating any of these items—or about anything that I eat at all. I trust my body to give me hunger cues that point me towards a balanced diet, which includes ice cream and cookies as part of it. Feelings of guilt or negative associations with food leads to restricting that food which, for many of us, leads to obsessing about that food until we eat the food and feel guilty all over again. I don’t want to feel like that anymore. I don’t want to feel like I’m losing control of my life because I had an ice cream cone or that I’m spinning out of orbit after a piece of pizza. When I’m able to have ice cream anytime I want, I find that I don’t need it every day, and when I do eat it I’m really only hungry for a scoop or two. When I bar ice cream from my diet entirely, I’m constantly craving Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food and then down an entire pint in bed when I finally get my hands on it.
Food shouldn’t make you feel bad about yourself. It shouldn’t make you feel guilty or out of control or uncomfortable. You don’t need food guilt to keep yourself in line. Here’s a challenge for this week: if you have food on your list of guilty pleasures, take it off that list! Replace tasty treats that you should happily enjoy with those habits that maybe you should feel a little guilty about [although honestly, you do you]. Here’s my updated, food-free list of guilty pleasures:
Laying on my bed with my clean laundry because it smells SO good
Country music
Watching Gossip Girl even though I know it’s a veritable soap opera and Blake Lively is obviously like 25 years old playing a high schooler
Buying clothes I don’t need from American Eagle
Buying all kinds of things I don’t need from Target
Takeaways: food shouldn’t make you feel guilty! Also I might have a shopping addiction.
