Good vs. bad food!
Do you have a list like this in your head? A list that tells you what you are supposed to eat and what you need to stay away from at all costs! What are on your lists? What foods do you consider safe to eat? What are your fear foods?
The good food/bad food list was not always in your head. It developed very slowly over time to get you where you are today…afraid to eat. Afraid of how many calories are going into your body. Afraid this will be the food to make the scale move in the ‘wrong’ direction. The list might have started after reading a magazine article, listening to a trainer at the gym or watching an infomercial about quick weight loss. What situations have you experienced that have made you deem a food as bad? A little kernel of information can lead you to make big assumptions about food and food groups which leads to a fear of eating very little from that food group.
What if I told you there are no good or bad foods? This is hard for many people to believe, however labeling food as either good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, fattening/non fattening…will keep you in the diet mentality. You might be thinking, “But what if X food has a lot of saturated fat or refined sugar? I’m told those are bad for me, so doesn’t that make the food bad?” In reality, different foods have different nutrient densities, but that doesn’t make one better than another. What I have found with my clients is this, once you deem a food bad it is put in a little corner of the brain that says, “Under no circumstance should you eat this food. But, if you decide to eat this food then you are bad”. Your brain will start telling you that you are the bad thing, and you will start to believe it. You haven’t done anything illegal or immoral. You haven’t robbed a store, you haven’t killed anyone or embezzled money from your company. All you were doing was eating a food that you labeled as bad.
The food you put on the bad food list is terrifying to eat, especially if you feel as if you have no control when eating it. You fear once the package is open you will devour the whole box before you even bat an eye; you won’t be able to eat just 2 or 3. You are not giving yourself permission to eat what you want when you want it (yes there are limitations on how often and how much is right for you to eat but now is not the time to talk about limiting food, we will get to that in another newsletter). When you know you can have any type of food any time you want it…the need or desire for the food diminishes. You will not crave the food as you presently do.
This is a similar analogy to a child with a new toy. The toy is new and shiny and the child plays with it all day and night. Then after a while you find it in the bottom of the toy box, it is just another toy. Food is the same way. If you allow yourself to eat a food you fear, there is a great possibility you will eat the whole package, maybe even 2 or 3 or 4 packages. But, over time, if you allow yourself to eat the food and not feel guilty for this, the food will just become food and nothing more. You need to give yourself the time for this to happen. The longer foods have been labeled good and bad to you, the longer it will likely take for them to lose those labels.
