Are you ready to make peace with food?
Have you ever felt guilt or shame associated with food?
Well, this blog post is perfect! We are going to focus on how to make peace with food.
A major factor towards making peace with all foods is unlearning the food rules that you have adopted based on society and cultural standards. To unlearn these lessons, we must search internally to discover all of these different rules, which have been taken in over the course of your lifetime.
Before beginning your journey to make peace with food, understand that this is not a one or two-stop journey that has a definitive timeline. Making peace with food and restoring your connection with food is hard work that requires time and effort.
Making peace with food is the third principle of intuitive eating. You may have seen this terminology on social media before, and, in truth, this principle is horribly misconstrued on social media. So, what does it mean to make peace with food?
To make peace with food you have… no fear foods, no forbidden foods, no restrictions, no morality attached to food, and…
The choice to eat what you want to eat.
Let’s begin by working through a few journaling prompts. Grab a notebook & pen or make use of a note taking app on your phone! Remember: making peace with food is a journey and writing thoughts down can be a useful tool moving forward.
- How many years have you been dieting?
Dieting can refer to a variety of behaviors. Dieting can be overt, such as following diets like the keto diet. Or, it can be a bit more disguised, like following food rules. For example, intermittent fasting focuses less on the composition of the food but a schedule for eating.
You may have been dieting for 5, 10, 20, 30+ years.
You are not alone. While we all have different life experiences, one thing we can connect on is that diet culture has stolen so much from us. Diet culture has taken our time, money, happiness, relationships, and more.
Discussing the idea of not dieting may be scary because you have become so habituated to its place in your life. Spending years dieting often makes people committed to dieting, losing weight, or shrinking their body.
To put it in perspective, imagine how experienced a bartender would be at their job if they had been working as a bartender for twenty years. They’d be a pretty good bartender!
So, you have been dieting for years. Maybe you could have even been termed a “professional dieter.” To begin to make peace with food, we must actively unlearn the ideas and beliefs forced onto us by diet culture.
- Do you feel guilt or shame from eating a specific type of food or portion of food?
Common foods that we have heard that elicit feelings of fear, guilt, and shame in our clients include ice cream, chips, pasta, fried foods, and others. You may have even read that list and identified a food or two that you have forbidden from your diet, either previously or currently.
- Does eating fear/forbidden foods change your character or make it worse?
Of course not! No, no no.
Feeling guilt or shame for eating fear/forbidden foods does not make you a bad human being. Now that you can separate your character from foods, you can begin to examine and challenge the guilt connected to the food.
Guilt is an emotion rooted in morality. It’s normal to feel guilt after hurting someone, stealing from someone, cheating on someone or on a test, etc. But, eating food is not an action that should elicit feelings of guilt & shame because there is nothing inherently immoral about eating ANY food! Recognize moments when you feel guilt and remind yourself that “good” and “bad” foods do not exist.
- Are the foods that create feelings of guilt foods that you have previously restricted or told yourself you “could not have?”
If you reflect yes, you have to lift the restrictions to truly make peace with food. You may be thinking you will be out of control and never stop eating it because if you aren’t restricting the food, you’re binging on it. But, the entire reason for the binge IS the restriction.
Imagine a bow & arrow. Restricting pulls the string of the bow so tight until the urgency to eat the forbidden food arises. When this happens, the arrow flies from the bow and you consume the food. Because your brain does not know when you will get it again, you eat more. Then, you might feel guilt and shame.
There is nothing wrong with you. Research tells us that continuing to restrict will continue the restriction-binge cycle.
Once you remove the restriction and eat the food, you will notice that the frequency of eating the food will decrease. This is due to food habituation. Think of it in regard to diet culture, if you have only been allowed to have smoothies for breakfast, for example, smoothies are probably the last thing you truly want to have for breakfast.
The same is true for fear/forbidden foods. Imagine pizza is the food you are lifting a restriction from. If you decide to eat pizza for the first couple days after making that decision, you would find yourself not wanting to eat pizza. Maybe you’d find yourself craving something like a crunchy salad or apple. Maybe you’d crave something with protein. These cravings come from a place of genuinely wanting these foods in your body.
When you make peace with food, the goal is not to ruin the food for yourself! The goal is to find a place of neutral choices and interactions so you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want.
In moments of fear through your journey to make peace with food, remind yourself that your brain and body are not about to enter a binge, because the restriction has been lifted. As you introduce forbidden foods, remind yourself you will not want to eat this food forever and are making amazing strides towards your goal of finding freedom from food rules and diet culture.
Give yourself credit for having the courage and curiosity to learn more. Simply being at this point in your journey and starting to remove some of the shame and guilt is such a huge step in making peace with food.
If this blog post resonated with you, listen to our podcast episode “How to Make Peace with Food” to hear more! You can listen to our Find Food Freedom podcast episode here on Apple Podcasts. We also stream our podcast on Spotify and Amazon Music!
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