How to Stop Feeling Guilty About Your Eating

Does your eating often make you feel guilty?

When you feel guilty about your eating, it’s likely a sign you have a “food rule” you’d benefit from challenging.

A food rule is a belief regarding what is or isn’t allowed when it comes to your eating. Here are some common ones:

• No eating after 7 p.m.

• I can only eat a set number of macros, calories or points a day.

• No snacking between meals.

• High-carb foods are off-limits (e.g., greens are good; bread and pasta are bad).

• Every meal must contain a certain number of protein grams.

• I’m allowed one cheat day a week.

• Foods made with white flour, added sugars, etc. are forbidden.

• If it’s not organic, I can’t eat it.

• Gluten is a no-no (even though I don’t have celiac disease or a gluten intolerance).

• I shouldn’t eat if I’m not hungry.

• Sugary drinks, processed foods and fast food are prohibited.

• Sweets can only be eaten on the weekend.

• No seconds.

Naturally, when you follow your rules, you likely feel proud, successful and good about yourself.

When you don’t adhere to your rules, you likely feel guilty, like a failure and bad about yourself. Breaking your rules may also trigger feelings of shame, stress, anxiety, fear, frustration, disappointment, anger and hopelessness.


Well-Intentioned, Often Problematic
Although often well-intentioned, there are many problems with food rules. For example, they…

• Disregard your body’s wisdom and needs, including its internal cues of hunger, fullness and satisfaction.

• Dictate your food choices regardless of how your body feels.

• Dismiss your food preferences and desires.

• Generate feelings of deprivation, which often results in obsessive food thoughts, intense cravings and frequent overeating.

• Provoke a make-up mentality (e.g., I must compensate for eating dessert by skipping breakfast or exercising longer tomorrow).

• Inject unwarranted morality into your relationship with food (e.g., I'm good if I eat this, bad if I eat that).

• Cultivate a mistrustful relationship with yourself, your body and food.

• Lead to secret eating, social anxiety and isolation (e.g., I’ll be too tempted to eat bad foods at the party; it’s safer to just stay home.).

• Prevent you from being flexible, relaxed and spontaneous in different eating environments and having fun with food.

• Decrease self-esteem and self-confidence.

• Consume headspace, time and energy that could be devoted to more fulfilling, meaningful, productive and pleasurable things.

Challenge Your Rules
If you want to stop experiencing all the unnecessary guilt and suffering your food rules cause, I encourage you to identify and challenge them, including examining how they impact you and your life.

With a curious, nonjudgmental mind, ask yourself:

Where did this rule come from? Is it helpful or harmful? Is it based on my own internal experience or an external source (e.g., diet or wellness culture)? Is it truly honoring, respecting and being kind to my body? Is it reasonable, sustainable, pleasurable and satisfying? Is it flexible enough for my life? Is it preventing me from having a peaceful relationship with food and living my life fully?


Follow the Clues
Some of your rules may be top of mind and others may be buried deeper, like lingering rules from past diets or your childhood home you aren’t aware you’re still adhering to.

If you’re unsure if you have food rules, pay attention to “should” or “shouldn’t” thoughts and feelings like guilt, shame, stress and anxiety that arise from your eating. These clues will point you toward your rules.

If you have trouble identifying or releasing your food rules, yet know you would benefit from doing so, consider getting support from an Intuitive Eating-informed practitioner.

Despite what our diet culture wants you to believe, you and your body can be trusted. You absolutely have the innate capacity to nourish yourself without following food rules or feeling any guilt.

Do You Think About Food Nonstop?

Do you spend a lot of time, energy and headspace thinking about food?

Is it hard to focus on work, concentrate on a book or show, or stay present while socializing because you’re distracted by thoughts about what you’re allowed to eat, when you’re allowed to eat, what you shouldn’t have eaten, or what you really want to eat but won’t let yourself have?

If this describes your experience, it’s most likely because:

1/ You are not eating enough

and/or

2/ You are not eating what you really want

If you are restricting your food intake because you’re following a plan, program or rules that dictate your eating, it’s only natural that you will feel both physically and psychologically deprived and thus feel preoccupied with food.*


Not About Willpower, Discipline or Addiction
Constant thoughts about food are not due to a lack of willpower, poor self-discipline or food addiction, despite what our diet culture wants you to believe.

When your very wise body is not getting its nourishment needs met because it’s experiencing hunger and food deprivation, it will do everything it can to get you to eat, including flooding your mind with thoughts of food.

In order to stop obsessing about food, you need to:

1/ Honor Your Hunger
Eat as soon as possible when your hunger sensations surface—or before they do if you anticipate becoming hungry yet circumstances won’t enable you to stop and eat (e.g., a work situation where eating isn’t possible).

If you feel disconnected from your hunger cues, which can happen if you have a history of ignoring or suppressing them, set a reminder to check in with your body at regular intervals to assess your hunger level and honor its needs.

2/ Eat Unconditionally
Give yourself full, unconditional permission to eat whatever you want whenever you want—assuming you have access to it and don’t have any limitations due to a health condition, such as a nut allergy or celiac disease.

For some, this approach to eating may sound reckless. It isn’t. It's about letting your internal cues guide your eating decisions instead of external rules and eating whatever tastes and feels the most satisfying to you.


Be Aware of Pseudo-Permission
Be aware, however, that it is possible to believe you are giving yourself unconditional permission to eat when you’re actually giving yourself pseudo-permission.

Pseudo-permission means you are granting yourself permission to eat something while simultaneously depriving yourself of it in the future.

This often shows up with thoughts such as “It’s okay if I eat pancakes for breakfast as long as I don’t eat any carbs for the rest of the day” or “I’ll let myself eat these chips, but I’m not going to buy them again for a long time” or “I can eat sweets on the weekend but not on weekdays.”

If you still find yourself consumed by food thoughts after practicing “unconditional eating” for a long time, it’s quite likely you are actually just giving yourself pseudo-permission to eat by putting conditions on your eating.

This is completely understandable, especially if you have a deeply engrained diet mentality, which can operate on a subconscious level and take time to let go of.


Space for More Fulfilling Things
When your body’s nourishment needs are fully satisfied and you no longer feel a sense of deprivation or scarcity, food will take a balanced place in your life.

You will think about food much less, ultimately freeing up space for more fulfilling, meaningful things.

If you have a long history of dieting and disordered eating, honoring your hunger and giving yourself unconditional permission to eat will likely feel very scary and challenging at first.

Your eating may feel off-kilter or out-of-sorts for a while; this is a normal part of the process. Once you and your body truly trust that your needs will be consistently met, these feelings will subside.

It’s essential to be patient and compassionate with yourself and to get support, whether from an Intuitive Eating-informed counselor, therapist, nutritionist, online community, podcast or all of the above.

I encourage you to also keep reminding yourself of what’s on the other side of this sometimes hard and messy healing work: a peaceful, balanced and liberating relationship with food.

*It’s important to note that these feelings can also be due to food insecurity if you don’t have reliable access to enough food because of financial constraints or other barriers. If this is the case, I encourage you to seek out local food banks and public assistance programs. Here’s a good place to start.

A Birthday Party Wrapped in Diet Culture

What role does diet culture play in your life?

From the bakery line, dinner table and workplace to classrooms, doctors’ offices, TV shows and social media, diet culture is everywhere.

It has become so prevalent, normalized and accepted that it’s easy to not see it or question its impact, including the harm it can cause.

It’s completely understandable if you’re not quite sure what diet culture is. It’s a term a lot of people are unfamiliar with. However, once you understand what it means, you start to see it everywhere, including in your own life.

Diet Culture Defined
So what exactly is diet culture?

In her book, Anti-Diet, Christy Harrison sums up diet culture as:

“A system of beliefs that...

• equates thinness, muscularity, and particular body shapes with health and moral virtue;

• promotes weight loss and body reshaping as a means of attaining higher status;

• demonizes certain foods and food groups while elevating others; and

• oppresses people who don’t match its supposed picture of ‘health.’”

Wrapped in Diet Culture
Harrison goes on to give examples of diet culture, including skipping a birthday party because you’re afraid you’ll have to eat cake.

To further illustrate what diet culture looks like, let’s expand on this birthday party scenario.

Imagine it’s your nephew’s tenth birthday. You don’t want to attend his party because you don’t like how you look and you’re afraid you’ll lose control with the food that’s served.

You decide to go regardless because you love your family and value spending time with them.

On your way there, you listen to one of your favorite podcasts, which is sponsored by a weight-loss program that promises fast results and a detox tea endorsed by a celebrity.

When you arrive, you overhear your mom congratulating a cousin on her recent weight loss because diet culture has taught us to applaud weight loss as if it's someone’s greatest life achievement.

You reflect on how your cousin might feel if she gains the weight back, which inevitably happens to the majority of dieters. You know this all too well having “failed” countless diets over the years.

To avoid any comments your mom might make regarding the weight you’ve gained during one of the most traumatic years of our lives, you head right to the snack table. Once there, you’re relieved to discover a platter of crudité as carrot sticks and bell pepper strips are on your current diet’s green-light list.

While putting some veggies on a plate, your aunt praises you for being such a healthy eater, which is understandable as diet culture has trained us to put healthy eaters on a pedestal.

She goes on to say how bad she is because of all the chips and crackers she’s been snacking on. It’s hard to pay attention to her because you’re distracted with thoughts about how you can sneak some chocolate candy when no one is looking.

As you nibble on your crudité, you scan the bookshelf and observe how many of the diet books you also own. You laugh to yourself as you reflect on how we once believed eating fat was the worst thing we could possibly do. How misguided we all were!

Everyone gathers around when it’s time to cut the cake. You notice your eight-year-old niece is jumping up and down and clapping her hands with excited anticipation, likely because her parents rarely allow sweets in their house because, well you know, sugar is poison.

As cake slices are being distributed, your brother declines a piece because he’s not eating carbs, your mom asks for just a sliver because she’s watching her figure, and your uncle announces while accepting a slice that today is his cheat day.

A neighbor chimes in exclaiming how sinfully good the cake is. She then admits she will need to make up for eating it by working out extra hard later. Many of the guests laugh and nod in agreement.

Meanwhile, you graciously take a piece of cake and then hide it in the trashcan when no one is around because you’re afraid that once you start eating it you’ll never stop.

Leaving the kitchen, you spot your niece quietly slip off to her bedroom with another plate of cake. You see yourself in her as you, too, started sneaking food when you were young to avoid getting in trouble for eating the foods you loved. You understood that eating those "bad" foods made you a bad kid, so of course you didn't want to get caught.

As the party wraps us, your sister-in-law attempts to send the leftover cake and snacks home with everyone because she doesn’t trust herself with all that food in the house, well, except for the raw vegetables.

Some family members talk about getting dinner after the party but your sister declines because she doesn’t eat after 6 p.m. You pass as well because you don’t want to be tempted to eat anything that’s off-plan, especially after being so good all day.

On the way home, exhausted from being so hyper-vigilant about your eating, you stop to pick up a salad because it sounds more appealing than the meal-replacement shake you’re supposed to have for dinner. You end up ordering pizza, breadsticks and a brownie because, understandably, you feel deprived and unsatisfied. While it all tastes delicious the experience is tainted by feelings of guilt and shame. You get angry with yourself for your lack of willpower and self-discipline.

In bed that night you scroll through Instagram looking at before-and-after photos, clean eating tips and bikini-body workouts while promising yourself that tomorrow you’ll get back on track.

Diet Culture's Harmful Impact
While everyone at the party meant well—after all, we all swim in this same toxic stew—most people don’t understand how damaging diet culture can be. The amount of harm and unnecessary suffering it causes is vast, from food fears and body mistrust to weight stigma and eating disorders.

More than anything, it keeps you from focusing on more meaningful, fulfilling things and participating fully in life.

You Can Opt Out
I believe in body autonomy, including the right to diet and eat however you want. However, if engaging with diet culture isn’t working for you, you can opt out.

Although diet culture is pervasive, you can minimize your participation in it, from unfollowing diet-culture accounts on social media and setting boundaries regarding diet and weight talk to reclaiming your ability to eat intuitively and embracing body diversity.

I think you’ll discover, as both my clients and I have, that by opting out of diet culture, you will feel like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders—and you’ll no longer be afraid of birthday parties.

For a deeper dive into diet culture, I highly recommend reading Anti-Diet. For a shorter read, check out this article. Both of these are great resources to share with friends and family members. If you want support with recovering from diet culture, I’m here for you.