When Lunch is a Bag of Chips. The Power of Zooming Out.

Well, it happened again!

The other day, I once again didn’t have time to eat lunch. When I did, I grabbed a bag of chips.

They were fast, easy and tasty. 

It wasn't a big deal. I just ate them and moved on.

When I was entrenched in diet and wellness cultures, my internal Food Police would have been screaming at me.

It would have been shouting things like, “What’s wrong with you? I can’t believe you ate such a bad lunch! You’re so unhealthy. You really need to get it together! And you better make up for it!”

My chip lunch would have been a BIG DEAL, one loaded with guilt, shame, punitive thoughts and compensatory behaviors.

Different Perspective
Thankfully, after years of challenging my inner Food Police voice and all the rules it tries to enforce, it’s much quieter these days and rarely pipes up. 

Plus, I’ve learned to take a different perspective.

Both diet and wellness culture condition us to hyper-focus on every single morsel we eat. 

They make us feel like one episode of eating will make or break our health, heal us or kill us, turn a “good” eating day into a “bad” one. 

They cause us to fear “messing up” and convince us we have to eat perfectly to be a healthy, in control, good person.

This rigid, black-and-white, perfectionistic approach is unrealistic and harmful. 

It causes a lot of unnecessary guilt, stress and anxiety and can drive a disordered relationship with food.

Zooming Out
One of the most helpful practices I’ve learned is to change my perspective by zooming out. 

Zooming out means widening your lens and viewing your eating patterns over time instead of hyper-focusing on one bite, snack, meal, day or week of eating. 

Unless you have a health condition that requires full adherence to a specific way of eating, what you eat over a longer period of time matters much more than what you eat for an afternoon snack or weeknight dinner, at a business lunch or birthday party, or on a weekend getaway, weeklong work trip or two-week vacation. 

Most and Sometimes
It’s also helpful to think in terms of “most of the time” and “sometimes.”

Take my chip lunch, for example:

Most of the time, I eat a balanced, substantial and satiating lunch. Sometimes, I just eat a bag of chips. 

(If you have kiddos in your life, this is an incredibly useful way to navigate their eating, too.)

Please note, I’m not demonizing chips! If most of the time your lunch consists of just chips and they satisfy your needs, this is totally okay. Intuitive Eating is all about doing what works best for you.

Flexible and Peaceful
I encourage you to cling less tightly to diet and wellness cultures’ narrow ideas about the right way to eat and to instead practice widening your lens.

Zooming out enables you to take a much more flexible, gentle, satisfying and sustainable approach to your eating. 

And, it makes for a much more peaceful and pleasurable relationship with food