8 Tips To Cope With Food Guilt
Feeling guilt after eating is a common experience when you’re healing your relationship with food. It doesn’t mean you’re failing, doing it wrong, or unable to change. Feelings like this are hard to work through and we can learn to tolerate, make space for, and get curious with what’s coming up.
A few questions to ask yourself when you experience food guilt:
What food rule did you break?
Where did you learn this rule? Who profits from this?
Would you tell a child or loved one to follow this rule?
What are your values, what’s important to you? Does following this rule align with that?
What is a more helpful thought and action you can take that will get you closer towards the relationship you want to have with food?
Neutralize and name what is happening. This is neither good nor bad, it’s just (name it: ex. food, eating past comfortable fullness, a midnight snack).
Self compassion: I’m having a hard moment and it’s ok to feel this way. It makes sense I’d feel guilty after following all these food rules for so long. Unlearning years of diet mentality while living in a culture obsessed with thinness is really hard! I can extend kindness, warmth, and understanding towards myself, I’m doing the work to repair my relationship with myself.
Repeat: I am enough, lovable and worthy as I am right now. I am not broken, I don’t need fixing, and can regain trust in myself and my body. I am working on my relationship with myself and it is going to take time.
These are just 8 of many routes you can take when you feel a wave of emotion.
It’s important to have a few options that speak to you since these might not always fit the circumstance.
Remember:
•Thoughts are not facts or orders.
•We don’t have to take all our thoughts seriously.
•We are going to have all kinds of thoughts (“good” ones and “bad” ones) because that’s what our minds are designed to do: Have thoughts!
•We can notice the unhelpful thoughts, not get hooked by them, and think of what would be a more helpful thought - what would get us closer to the relationship with food we want to have (and/or life we want to have, type of person we want to become).
Change takes time, be gentle with yourself. Consider how long you have been in the diet mentality, it’s probably going to take longer than you want to deprogram from it. Diet culture is everywhere and thin privilege exists, we may not be able to completely eliminate some of these thoughts but we can learn how to work through them.
