Three Skills to Help with ‘Food Guilt’
A common experience that many of my clients in treatment for their eating disorder report is feeling extremely guilty when they eat certain foods, or when they eat “too much”. Maybe this inner dialogue feels familiar to you too if you have a history of dieting and disordered eating. The thoughts might sound like “I am so bad for eating that” or “I shouldn’t have eaten so much, why can’t I stay disciplined?”.
Here are a few skills to help you get out of the food guilt cycle and back into a peaceful relationship with food!
1. Check the facts when guilt shows up
The “Checking the Facts” skill is a classic Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) skill that comes in handy when food guilt shows up. One question we can ask when we start to feel guilt over a food choice is “is this appropriate guilt or inappropriate guilt?”. Let’s define appropriate guilt (because guilt as an emotion is helpful from time to time!). Appropriate guilt is guilt that shows up when you have done something that goes against your personal morals and values. If I say something mean to a loved one, I am going to feel guilt, and that would be appropriate. Guilt is helping me out in this moment because now I will go apologize and rectify the situation and do better moving forward. Without appropriate guilt, I may not be prompted to apologize and then my relationship suffers.
Inappropriate guilt would be guilt that shows up to alert you that you have violated your personal morals or values, but after further examination, feeling guilt doesn’t match the moment or the facts, and no repair or changes are needed. Let’s say you eat three cookies for breakfast and feel guilty for being undisciplined, a bad person, or fill in the blank with all the things your mind says to you in this moment. We can check the facts and really ask if eating three cookies for breakfast makes you a bad person, is harmful to someone or something you love, or goes against any of your morals or values such as being kind, caring, a hard worker at your job, a good parent, etc. Attaching guilt to food is learned in diet culture, but it may not actually fit your personal moral compass!
2. Reframe what food guilt means when it shows up
Cognitive reframing is a therapeutic technique that involves noticing a thought, and challenging the way we are interpreting what that thought means. I might reframe a thought “I’m such a failure!” to “I had a great opportunity to learn by doing this”. We can use the same tools here with food guilt thoughts. Here are two of my favorite reframes when guilt shows up:
Reframe guilt as recalibrating your moral compass
One of my favorite ways to reframe food guilt is to look at that guilt as my moral compass going through a recalibration. Sometimes a compass doesn’t point true north after a while and requires recalibration. If you have taught yourself for years that eating certain foods, food groups, or amounts of food are morally bad, of course you will feel guilty when you eat! This is how you’ve calibrated your moral compass. Once you learn something new such as intuitive eating, food neutrality, and food freedom, we are now working on recalibrating our true north.
Reframe guilt as recovery-focused or eating-disorder focused
Another great way to reframe food guilt when it shows up is labeling your guilt as recovery-focused guilt. When I worked at an eating disorder hospital many years ago, a client put this skill beautifully. She said “as it stands right now, every time I eat I am going to feel guilty. I would rather feel positive guilt that heads me toward recovery than negative guilt that leads me back to my eating disorder”. Now that my friends is profound advice.
3. Pull up a chair for your guilt and invite it to the table.
Personifying our emotions helps us get some space from them, including guilt! When guilt shows up at the dinner table, pull up a chair for guilt and see if it wants anything to eat or drink. You might say something like “So you are joining us for dinner after all! Let me get you a chair since you’ll be hanging out for a while it seems”. Why does this work? A few factors come into play with personifying our emotions. 1. When we think of our guilt as a separate thing from the self, it doesn’t feel like it’s consuming us. It can be easier to see that guilt is just one aspect of us in the midst of many other emotions, thoughts, and experiences. It feels a little easier to tackle! 2. We can see our guilt a with a little more clarity and decide if it’s worth listening to in the moment. We can more easily move to a neutral, noticing mind instead of getting swept away by the current of our emotions when we get some space from our emotions.
If you are in search of a therapist who specializes in eating disorders, disordered eating, and healing your relationship with your body, please feel free to visit my website or email me to see if working together might be a good fit for you. My office is based in Salado, Texas, and I can provide virtual therapy services across the state of Texas.
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