I’m working on intuitive eating. How do I stop feeling so guilty about food?

A few weeks ago I asked Chat GPT for some of the most frequently asked questions about intuitive eating. As my keyboard clacked out answers, I realized I had quite a bit to say about breaking free from food guilt. Now you know I gotta plug Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach and its companion workbook. These texts are incredibly useful for unpacking food guilt – with helpful tools, worksheets, and reflections.

Aside from the Intuitive Eating texts, I’ve found a few reflections that have been helpful for clients working through food guilt.

But first, my standard disclaimer: This post is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individualized medical or mental health care. It does not constitute a patient-provider relationship. The content of this post might not feel useful to you right now—please take the information that serves you and leave the rest.

Check in with your thoughts:

The way we talk to ourselves about food has a tremendous impact on our guilt and anxiety at mealtimes. Notice the language and tone of your self-talk around food.

If you’re being really hard on yourself: “I’m disgusting for eating pizza.”

Try reframing the thought: "Pizza is a totally normal food that lots of people eat! I’m normal for eating pizza, not disgusting.”

 Or standing up to the self-talk: "Yikes, that was really mean, what I just thought. It’s not cool to talk to myself that way, I’m want to let that thought go”

You might also try reflecting on the origins of your food beliefs. What’s wrong with pizza anyway? Your diet culture mind will likely start identifying reasons why you shouldn’t eat pizza: carbs, calories, cheese, sodium – whatever.

Notice if any of these thoughts are exaggerated: "This pizza is absolutely loaded with carbs, I’m so bad for eating carbs.”

You can stop here if you’re new to intuitive eating work. Just noticing the thought is exaggerated, extreme, maybe even silly can be enough to start the unlearning process.

You might also start to question these thoughts: “Is pizza really loaded with carbs? Or is it a mix of carbs, protein, and fat?”

“Am I bad for eating carbs? Lots of really great people eat carbs every day. Why would eating carbs make someone a bad person?”

Be gentle and curious as you approach this work. Try using more neutral and non-judgmental self-talk. Notice if the approach beings easing some of your guilt around food. 

Don’t get overwhelmed with nutrition minutia:

There is so much unhelpful nutrition information out there. And it’s not just a social media problem. Medical institutions, scholarly journals, and reputable news organizations regularly publish the “latest” in nutrition science. And while phytonutrients, trace elements, and short chain fatty acids are important to the scientific study of human nutrition, they have little relevance in day-to-day eating. Because, if you’re eating a varied diet, you’re already getting all that good stuff without even thinking about it. It’s not that these complicated nutrition specifics (the nutrition minutia) are wrong, it’s that they aren’t helpful in daily life.

In one of my very first posts on this blog, I wrote, “When we get too focused on the minutia of nutrition it can seem impossible to eat healthfully. . . . Because if broccoli has too many carbs for a Keto diet and black beans aren’t Paleo then f*ck it, let's just have pizza.”

The nutrition minutia feeds into guilt around food. It leads to good food/bad food thinking and a sense that we need to be carefully monitoring everything we eat. To start letting go of unhelpful nutrition details, I suggest considering a basic structure for how you want your meals to look form day to day. You might try the Balance, Variety, and Moderation or Plate by Plate methods. Or perhaps you set a goal to eat three meals and one or two snacks everyday with some carbs, protein, and fat at each meal and fruits or vegetables once or twice a day. These simple meal planning tools will absolutely meet your nutrition needs without all the overthinking. So, when you notice the food minutia getting loud, you can remind yourself that your intake was balanced for the day and you don’t need to stress about phytonutrients.

Explore the fullness-guilt connection:

PSA: You’re supposed to eat until you’re full. Like, actually comfortably full and satisfied. The stretch receptors in your stomach should be activated after a meal. Of course, this is not what diet culture teaches. We think we should stop eating the second we’re no longer hungry. (In intuitive eating, the point of being no longer hungry is considered “neutral”, not full.) And over time, we learn to experience any amount of fullness as bad. And ok, fullness is a spectrum, just like hunger. There are levels of fullness that are uncomfortable and indicate overeating. But between “neutral” and “overly full” lies comfortable fullness.

If you’re working on intuitive eating, you may be practicing eating more consistent and satisfying meals. You may be tuning in to hunger and fullness sensations. And you may be experiencing sensations of fullness that are absolutely appropriate in intuitive eating, but that may have been a source of guilt on past diets. For folks early in intuitive eating, it can take time to unlearn the fullness-guilt connection. When you notice sensations of fullness emerging, try taking a few deeps breaths and acknowledging your fullness. Explore how the sensation of fullness is different from guilty emotions. Remind yourself that fullness is normal and sign that you ate a satisfying meal, not that you did something wrong.

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I hope these reflections might be useful for you. But if not, I want you to know you aren’t alone. Many of the tools in this post and in The Intuitive Eating Workbook utilize Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT. CBT isn’t always my favorite therapeutic modality. It’s head work where I tend to prefer body work. It’s thoughts, not feelings. It is, by its very definition, cognitive. For lots of folks, the stress, shame, even trauma around food is deeply rooted in embodied emotional experiences. It’s more than, “I shouldn’t have eaten that.” It’s feeling shaky, shut down, or nauseated. It’s having trouble sleeping or needing to go for a walk because you feel so guilty you can’t calm down. The CBT tools in this post are a good place to start but they may not be enough to heal years of diet or weight trauma. If you’ve done the head work but you’re still feeling guilty about food, please consider reaching out. Support is always available.

With Compassion,

Stephanie