Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt personally victimized by the guilt you feel for something you’ve eaten or have thought about eating. If your hand is high in the air like mine, unfortunately you’re not alone. This is the most common thing clients tell me they are experiencing and want to be done with – feeling guilty over food.
Most of the time, food guilt shows up in the form of a little voice in our heads telling us we’re “bad” for eating something or that choosing a certain food automatically means we’re “unhealthy”. The same voice can also nag at us to choose something “healthy” or “be good” so we don’t fall off track. This voice is the Food Police. I lovingly refer to it as your “Inner A**hole” 🙂
Why challenge the food police?
It’s no surprise that many of us have this little voice whispering in our ear and commenting on all of our food choices. Food has become extremely moralized in our society thanks to diet culture. We’re constantly exposed to messages from food companies, social media, and our friends about foods being indulgent, sinful, and guilty pleasures. The reverse is also true, with some foods being marketed as guilt-free, better-for-you, and “good choices”. This binary takes eating from a normal, pleasurable activity to something moralistic – where we become “good” or “bad” based on what foods cross our lips.
The problem is, most of this moralizing is subconscious. We very rarely think about the messages we’re consuming or the way we’re speaking about food or ourselves. However, one of the most profound things I’ve learned as I’ve started practicing more mindfulness and embracing Intuitive Eating is that the way we speak about ourselves has a really big impact on they way we treat ourselves.
Recognizing the Voices
An important step towards challenging the Food Police is first noticing what they are saying. As in the Intuitive Eating book (affiliate link), I find it’s helpful for clients to start identifying who is talking:
Harmful Voices
Food Police
The Food Police is our inner diet culture voice. It is a voice that develops over the course of dieting and implementing various rules around food. It’s the voice that tells us if we’re “good” or “bad”, even if we’re not actively on a diet. The Food Police may judge the types of food you’re eating (i.e. carbohydrates, snacks), the time of day you’re eating, the amount you’re eating, or whether or not you exercised today.
Nutrition Informant
The Nutrition Informant is a voice that on the surface appears to be helpful, but in reality is colluding with the Food Police. The Nutrition Informant operates under the guise of health, makes it difficult to identify. This voices takes nutrition evidence/advice and creates rigidity and rules in the name of health and wellness. For example, we know that eating fruits and vegetables is important for health, but the Nutrition Informant may tell us those are the only foods we’re allowed to eat for snacks or they must be on our plate every time we sit down for a meal. With many of my clients, this voice often shows up as needing to religiously track macros or eat foods with zero sugar or carbohydrates. While we know that our bodies don’t feel their best if all we’re eating all the time is sugar, eating foods that contain sugar on occasion or as part of meals or snacks that contain other foods will not make or break our health.
Diet Rebel
I like to imagine the Diet Rebel as being on the other side of the pendulum from the Food Police. This voice can be angry and determined or almost child-like in its rebellion (sometimes I call it the Inner Teenager). “You’re telling me all I can eat is chicken, broccoli, and rice?! Well SCREW YOU! I’m going to eat this entire bag of cookies.” The Diet Rebel can lead to sneaking food, reactive eating, and disconnected eating (which often leads to overeating).
Helpful Voices
So what can we do about the Harmful Voices? Over time, we can help them become more helpful voices by challenging what they have to say.
Food Anthropologist
To me, the Food Anthropologist is a great example of putting the skills of mindfulness into practice. This voice is a neutral observer – making observations without placing judgment. It notices what’s going on, and allows us to explore and discover food and our bodies. For example, the Food Anthropologist helps us notice signs of hunger and fullness, consider when we last ate, what we’re thinking, etc. This may sound like, “I skipped breakfast and now I’m hungry before my usual lunchtime.”
Keeping a food journal can be really helpful in helping awaken this voice. Consider noting the time of day, what you ate, and how you felt. This isn’t meant to be a tool for judgment; rather, it will help you reconnect with what you are experiencing physically and mentally.
Nurturer
The Nurturer is our positive self-talk voice. It’s gentle, caring, and compassionate. When I tell my clients to stop being mean to themselves, I’m encouraging them to call on their Inner Best Friend. The Nurturer can help you talk back to the Food Police when its being mean. I like to have clients cultivate this voice by thinking about what they would say to a friend in this situation. For example, if feeling guilty about having dessert and enjoying something sweet. “It’s ok to enjoy dessert. Eating dessert is fun and normal.”
Rebel Ally
The Rebel Ally is what the Diet Rebel can become. This voice can be what supports us in setting boundaries with friends/family around food and our bodies. Rather than saying “SCREW YOU” and doing the opposite of what someone says you should, this voice allows you to directly establish/re-establish the boundary and continue making choices that are most supportive for you.
Nutrition Ally
The Nutrition Ally is what the Nutrition Informant voice can become once we’ve banished the Food Police. The Nutrition Ally is described in Intuitive Eating as being “interested in healthy eating with no hidden agenda”. Choices made with the help of this voice are “based on health and satisfaction, not deprivation or dieting”. This tends to be the one of the last helpful voices to appear because it’s often so entangled with the Food Police. An important thing to pay attention to in order to distinguish between the Nutrition Ally and its evil twin, the Nutrition Informant, is how you feel when this voice comes up. If you make a decision in the name of health, but feel guilty, then it’s likely the Food Police and Nutrition Informant still guiding your decisions.
Intuitive Eater
The Intuitive Eater is a combination of all of these helpful voices. It knows how to challenge the Food Police and call upon the Nurturer when you need to hear something supportive. It can interpret your instincts, whether biological or psychological. It’s the voice that we will eventually be able to have take the lead as we go through this process.
How to Start Challenging the Food Police
Now that we’ve given names to all of the voices in our head, how do we start talking back to the unhelpful ones and cultivating our Intuitive Eating voices?
- Notice when you are having “black and white” or “all or nothing” thinking. Very few things in life are absolute. Individual foods are not “good” or “bad”, you are not “on track” or “off track”, there is no right or wrong way to eat. Can you embrace the gray of enjoying and eating both salads and pizza? All foods fit into a nourishing diet.
- Practice flexible thinking. This goes hand in hand with the above, but get rid of the words “must”, “should/shouldn’t”, and “have to”. Work on giving yourself permission and flexibility by substituting in the words “can”, “may”, and “it’s ok to”. Flexibility is one of the keys to a healthy relationship with food.
- See the glass as half-full. Focus on what has gone well for you on this journey (no matter how small), rather than dwelling on challenges. Consciously respond to each negative thought you have with a positive one. Eventually, more positive thoughts can become the default.
- Embrace continual change and learning rather than expecting a straight line and specific plan. Most of us are super goal and success oriented, which can sometimes causes us to overlook how we actually get there. Focusing on the experience of the process is an important piece of Intuitive Eating and lets you be more in tune with your body and its signals.
Honestly, I could have made this post much more succinct by simply typing: Don’t be a d*ck to yourself. (Sorry for the language, but it’s the truth.) However, I don’t think that really would have stuck with you without some sort of explanation, so I hope everything else I wrote was helpful too 😉
So tell me, how are you challenging the food police?
Feel free to drop a comment below or shoot me a message – I love hearing from you! If you feel like you could use some help shutting down those harmful voices and strengthening the helpful ones, you can apply to work with me here.
Mindfully yours,
Sam
