Where Do You Stand? Some foods are bad vs. No foods are bad

Sometimes it seems like every week there's a new food to villainize or put on a pedestal. And our current culture also implies that it's a moral obligation to want to eat healthy all the time!

But your body knows better! We have normal cravings for foods that we enjoy! Restrictive diets just cannot work long term. They leave us with very rigid, and often obsessive, thought patterns about food. As you have seen in previous posts I engaged in restrictive eating for at least four years! (And really I've done it more than that.) It cannot be sustained and usually results in lots of problems. To compensate for the rigid thinking we may also engage in binge eating which happens when we feel overwhelmed, hungry, and out of control – like we can’t fit into the box we are “supposed to”. We can get into a cycle of restricting/bingeing/restricting. Then we feel guilty about that so we binge again.

Food has plenty of appropriate uses in our culture, including nourishment, celebration, and even emotional eating (how many of you have eaten the gallon of ice cream after a big disappointment------it's really ok!)

Food has no morality, and no shame or blame. No foods are bad.

Tuning into your body, practicing body respect is more realistic. When we get in touch with what feels good and what hunger, satisfaction, and comfortable fullness feel like, we start to realize things like this:

“My stomach and I in general feel better when I eat a variety of foods instead of eating an entire box of crackers”

“Having one cookie isn’t enough, but I feel uncomfortably full when I eat more than 4”

“I have more long-lasting energy when I eat a tuna sandwich with protein and complex carbohydrates than when I go to Starbucks to get a muffin with refined carbohydrates” … The list goes on!

Are you ready to learn body respect? You can in my next Initial 6-Week Round which starts May 3! I have 4 spots left! Be the next one!