Discover the top 8 healthy habits to start in your 20s for a strong foundation of well-being that will benefit you for a lifetime. You can enjoy your 20s and still focus on feeling great with these healthy habits!
Read More
Food obsessions can be defined as thoughts about food that make you anxious or preoccupied. These thoughts can range in intensity from occasional to constant, but they all make it difficult for someone with an eating disorder to enjoy life without being scared of what their next thought might be.
Guilt is when you feel remorseful or regretful over something you have done or failed to do. It’s a feeling of inadequacy or failure. The guilt we experience around food is usually related to things like dieting, not trusting our body to know how much it needs to eat, restricting calories, overeating one day and then restricting the next day because we feel guilty about the first day’s overeating. We feel guilty about what we eat because we've been told that certain foods are bad or unhealthy.
And we experience anxiety around food because it's out of our control- we never know how much will be on our plate and when it will come. The double edged sword is that being restrictive and not eating properly can actually worsen our anxiety over time due to inadequate nutrition.
Diet culture often makes us think that food is either good or bad, and if we choose the wrong food, we must suffer through guilt until we can make up for it with the next meal. Eating is framed as an act of self-control when it should be framed as an act of self-care.
It's time to start freeing yourself from the damaging messages of diet culture. Here are some steps you can take to start building a healthy relationship with food that’s based on nourishment, rather than deprivation and weight loss.