Eating disorders and any type of disordered eating brings a lot of guilt when it comes to eating and the food you might choose. A big part of it comes from the fact that we tend to categorize our food as “good” or “bad”, “healthy” or “unhealthy” and so on. The same applies to every black or white type of situation, good fat-bad fat, healthy weight-unhealthy weight. We tend to set these types of rules, but the more rigid the rules are the harder it is to maintain a healthy and balanced relationship with food and your body image.
So the question remains. How do I keep being healthy, but eliminate the guilt that comes with eating?
Firstly, you will have to reevaluate what healthy looks and feels like. But that’s a long story and it belongs on another post. If you have understood and adopted a more holistic view of what health is, the second step is to start challenging those rules.
What does this mean? How would it feel if you got to gradually change those rules into suggestions? You have to understand that everything you read about “healthy” eating are just suggestions. I would recommend starting from researching the knowledge of the person making any kind of nutritional suggestion. Are they the right people to give advice and why? If the person offering the advice is a certified professional, start trying to understand if the information is a good fit for you and your lifestyle. The more general the recommendation the less likely it is to fit your specific profile. So, if you are not sure of what or how much you should be eating, ask for personalized help.
If you have achieved that step and yet you feel guilt and confusion around eating, then you should keep reading. Most people that reach out to me, have already visited a few nutritionists before asking for my help and that is because they realize that the problem is not what type of diet or what food choices they are given. The biggest difficulty in those cases is the fact that people that tend to categorize food or bodies in good or bad, tend to also have a black or white type of thinking in other aspects of their lives too. This type of thinking creates a false sense of security or safety. If something is good you know you should be doing that and if something is bad you know you shouldn’t. Those are clear and easy rules to understand and follow, right?
However, in life very few things are so clearly differentiated. So, maybe it’s time for you to start looking into the gray areas, in food and in life. It might sound simple initially, but if for a long time you have taught yourself to look only into the black and white, you might need some time to find the gray and you don’t feel bad if you need some training in doing so. Some people have a hard time to even understand how they move from black to white and back and need help seeing where the gray zone is, before attempting to move there. For those that are able to see the gray, I’ve heard phrases like “gray” sounds boring, unsafe, not clear, more confusing, like mediocrity, feels like giving up and those are some strong feelings and thoughts to overcome. Letting go of the black and white doesn’t mean that you are giving up. On the contrary, you are giving yourself more options to choose from and if the black or the white seem the right choice you are always free to choose them. Give yourself time and take one step at a time.
