I'm Being So Bad! I Shouldn't Be Eating This!

Some years ago, while dishing up a bowl of oatmeal in the buffet line at a retreat center, a guest next to me was adding fresh berries to her granola.

As she drizzled honey on top of the fruit, she turned to me and said, “I’m being so bad! I’m not supposed to be eating this!”

Her comment caught me off guard. 

Uncertain how to respond, I just smiled at her and went about my breakfast-gathering business.

Hoping to Hear
I’m not exactly sure what response the woman was looking for, but I have a few ideas.

It’s possible she was hoping for some reassurance that she and her actions were okay, that she wouldn’t get caught cheating on her diet or completely go to pot after eating an apparently forbidden food. 

Maybe she felt that by confessing her “food sin” she’d be absolved of the guilt she was feeling.

Perhaps she wanted me to give her some sort of permission, like, “Hey, you only live once—go for it!” or “Heck, you work hard, you deserve it!”

Or she might have been hoping for a bonding moment, a shared experience of being bad. Something along the lines of, “I hear ya. I’m going to pay for eating all these carbs!”

Lasting Impression
Although it lasted only a few seconds, the encounter left a lasting impression on me.

I was struck by her need to call attention to her food choice, especially to me, a complete stranger. It was as if she was trying to say, “I know better! I usually don’t eat like this so please don’t judge me based on this one food crime.”

Even though exchanges like these are quite common and normalized in our diet-obsessed culture, the entire episode left me feeling a little sad for her, for myself, for all of us. 

I actually could really relate to what the woman was experiencing because I saw myself in her. I likely would have said something similar when I was entrenched in diet culture, following a bunch of food rules and worried about what others might be thinking about my choices.

Toxic Diet Culture
This is what our toxic diet culture has done to us. 

It has convinced us that there are good and bad foods and that we’re either good or bad depending upon which list we choose from. 

It’s made us believe our food choices are a reflection of our character, value, worth, willpower and intelligence.

It has conditioned us to feel guilty and ashamed of our innate human desire to eat and enjoy pleasurable food. 

It’s trained us to think we need to apologize and atone for our so-called eating transgressions.

And, it’s caused us to waste a ton of time, energy and headspace thinking about what we should or shouldn’t eat.

Designed to Keep Us in Line
Food moralization is an oppressive belief system designed to keep us in line. In our attempt to conform, to be good, to obey the rules, many of us have developed a fraught relationship with food.

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

At any moment, you can decide to defy diet culture, cultivate a morally neutral relationship with food and ultimately reclaim your power.

Perhaps your first step is simply becoming more aware of when you judge your eating decisions—and thus yourself—as good or bad. Start to question whether this is really true and if such black-and-white labeling is helpful or harmful.

Stealing is Bad; Eating Food Isn’t
If I could go back in time to that buffet line, I would look at that woman with compassion and empathy and say something that may have helped her view the situation and her beliefs differently, something like: 

Are you stealing the food? No? Well, then there’s absolutely no reason to feel bad or guilty. Truly. Enjoy your breakfast. Lick the bowl clean. Don't look back.

I Was Fixated on Food. I Thought I Was Just a Foodie.

Are you old enough to remember Gourmet magazine?
 
I was devastated when it shut down. 

I still recall where I was when I heard the magazine was closing. I was trekking in Nepal and met another traveler from the United States. As we were ambling along the trail, she shared the crushing news. 

I didn’t believe her at first. I thought it was a terrible rumor. 

I was shocked that such a beloved cultural icon with a rich 68-year-old history could shutter so abruptly.

My Entire World
I was devastated because I relished the magazine. It was such a special thrill to find it in my mailbox once a month nestled among the utility bills and grocery store ads.

It was also a bigger deal to me than one might expect, as food, including food media, was pretty much my entire world back then.

I spent hours devouring food magazines, websites, blogs, newsletters, books and TV shows. I read restaurant menus online and crawled into bed at night with cookbooks.

My work breaks and evenings were spent immersed in a clunky online message board reading fervent posts by food fanatics about who had the best burrito, brownie or bread in the Bay Area.

If Instagram existed back then, I’m sure many hours would have melted away as I scrolled through every food-related account.

I was infatuated with food. It was my primary focus. I thought it was because I was a foodie.

Understanding My Fixation
It wasn’t until years later that I came to fully understand my fixation. 

It was because I was hungry.

My thoughts were consumed by food because I wasn’t consuming enough food.

I was constantly thinking about food because my very wise body was trying to get me to eat more food. Low on energy due to dieting, it was attempting to get the fuel it desperately needed to survive.

Learning about the Ancel Key’s Minnesota Starvation Experiment (CW: calorie counts, disordered eating, photos) helped me see how my undereating drove many of my behaviors during this time, including my food fixation.

The experiment's objective was to study the physical and mental effects of starvation during World War II and postwar refeeding practices. Thirty-six young healthy men, all conscientious objectors, volunteered to be subjected to a calorie-restricted diet for six months.

One of the outcomes was the men became preoccupied with food, including constantly talking about it, dreaming about it, reading cookbooks and collecting recipes. 

By the time the study was completed in 1945, one participant owned more than 100 cookbooks.

Describing his fixation with food, another participant shared that “…it made food the most important thing in one's life…food became the one central and only thing really in one's life. And life is pretty dull if that's the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren't particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.”

Related to Their Experience
While my weight-loss intention was quite different (to look good*) than those of the men who participated in the study (to do good), we experienced many of the same food deprivation symptoms.

Not only had I become hyper-focused on food, like many of the study subjects I also found myself guarding my food, sneaking food, engaging in hunger-suppressing strategies, bingeing on food, feeling irritable, anxious, depressed and fatigued, becoming socially isolated and more.

And, like a few of the men in the study, I even got a job in the food industry. I became the marketing manager for a food website with a slick test kitchen. Sadly, I never ate a bite of any of the delicious food prepared in it as it wasn’t allowed on my diet.

Although in no way was my intentional deprivation from dieting comparable to the heartbreaking chronic hunger, starvation and malnourishment experienced by millions of people around the world, I can relate to so many of the things the food-deprived men in the study experienced. Maybe you can, too.

More Calories Than a Diet
It’s important to understand that the daily number of calories the men were fed during the study's “starvation” phase was similar to what most diet programs prescribe today.

While they were considered semistarved, the participants were likely eating more calories than many of us have been instructed to eat on some diets. 

It seems beyond unethical that diet companies have known for more than 75 years about the numerous physical and psychological harms their programs can cause yet they continue to offer them while intentionally neglecting to warn their customers of their potential adverse side effects. 

If they truly valued people’s wellbeing over their bottom line (ha!), this information would be made available so folks could make fully informed decisions.

Stopped the Fixation
As I started divesting from diet culture, giving myself unconditional permission to eat and fully nourishing my body, I stopped fixating on food. 

While the foodie in me still enjoys exploring different food cultures, reading an occasional food article, tuning into some food podcasts and shows, and experimenting with a new recipe now and then, my interest is nowhere near the level of obsession it was when I was dieting, which frees up a ton of time and energy for a variety of other pursuits.

Of course, not everyone who is obsessed with food and everything related to it is dieting, undereating or engaging in other disordered eating behaviors. People are passionate about food and really into food-related content for all sorts of reasons. 

Thankfully, my personal interest in food these days is because I find it fun, pleasurable, comforting, compelling, connecting and nourishing.

And if Gourmet magazine happens to be resurrected someday, I’d likely be quick to renew my subscription.

*I deeply regret that I had a lot of unexamined anti-fat bias at the time due to decades of social conditioning that taught me there was only one right way to have a body (i.e., the thin ideal) and warped my idea of what it meant to “look good.”

I Can't Keep Chips in My House. I Always Lose Control.

Do you have any trigger foods?
 
Are you afraid to keep certain foods in your house because you feel like you lose control with them every time you eat them? 

There is a very valid reason why some foods feel triggering.

Restriction.

If you’re like most people, your trigger foods are triggering because you are restricting them.

This was certainly the case for me when I was restricting food and following a bunch of food rules.

Natural Scarcity Response 
Potato chips are a common trigger food, so let’s use them as an example.

Let’s say you love potato chips but you rarely let yourself eat them because you consider them to be a “bad” food and every time you do allow yourself to have them, you feel completely out of control with them.

When you do break down and buy a bag, you can’t stop thinking about them sitting in your cupboard and you keep returning to the kitchen all afternoon for more until the last salty crumbs are licked off your fingers. Once the bag is gone and you’re full of chips and guilt, you decide the safest thing to do is to not eat them at all. 

“I can’t be trusted to have potato chips in my house! I’m never eating them again!” you proclaim to your friends who can all totally relate because, thanks to diet culture, they have trigger foods too.

But here’s the thing: 

When you don’t let yourself eat potato chips on a regular basis, you create a sense of scarcity and deprivation with them. 

The natural human response to scarcity and deprivation is to consume as much as possible of your restricted food when you do allow yourself to eat it. 

Basically, your very wise brain is thinking “I never get potato chips therefore I must eat as much as I can right now because I don’t know if I’ll ever have access to them again.”

On top of this, if you’re telling yourself while you’re eating the chips that you shouldn’t be eating them and won’t let yourself eat them again, you are amplifying the threat of scarcity and deprivation, which will further drive you to eat as much as you can right away. 

Unconditional Permission to Eat
If you want to stop feeling out of control with potato chips, you need to give yourself unconditional permission to eat all the potato chips you want whenever you want. 

This means stocking your kitchen with potato chips and freely eating them with meals, between meals, at breakfast, for dessert, however you desire.

This continuous exposure to your trigger food leads to habituation. 

The more you eat potato chips, the more you habituate to them. 

In time, their reward value and power over you will diminish and they will become ordinary and neutral—basically, no big deal.

The goal of habituation isn’t to no longer want your trigger foods, but rather to create a trusting, satisfying and peaceful relationship with them, one that’s free of fear, guilt and shame. 

Understandably Feels Scary
Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat your trigger foods can, understandably, feel pretty scary. 

It’s so helpful to understand that it’s completely normal to eat a lot of your trigger foods in the beginning of the habituation process because your brain is still operating in scarcity mode. It will take time for it to calm down and trust that it will have regular access to previously restricted foods.

This phase of making peace with food freaks a lot of people out, which is why it can be so helpful to get support, whether it’s from an Intuitive Eating counselor, coach, therapist or online community.

When working with my clients, we talk about various strategies that can help them with the habituation process so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming and send them running back to the land of restriction.

Once my clients start habituating to their trigger foods, they start to see that, despite what diet culture wants them to believe, they can trust themselves with any food, regardless of their history with it. Feeling this sense of trust and freedom with food is profoundly liberating.

Here's what my client Jenny had to say about her experience: 

"One of my biggest wins has been being able to have all types of food in my house. Before, I couldn’t have any sweets or baked goods at home otherwise I would just eat them all in one sitting. Having that stuff in my house and not bingeing on it has been a huge positive change. The day I started forgetting it was there was a big day!"