“You feel tired? That’s because you’ve been eating too many sweets.”
“You have a headache? Must be from the soda you drank earlier.”
“You have acne? Of course, that’s because you had potato chips yesterday.”
“Your pants are feeling a bit tighter than usual? Well, that’s what happens when you eat white flour.”
If you have an eating disorder, these thoughts might sound familiar. You believe that everything you eat will immediately impact how you look and feel. Feel good? Then you must be eating well. Feel bad? Then eat better.
Your eating disorder will jump at every chance it gets to make you feel guilty for eating. It will turn something as random as having oily skin to being all about food. And that’s the thing. Food isn’t really the problem. It’s all in your head.
For example, you might convince yourself that you feel much better after eating an apple versus a doughnut. But most likely, you can’t physically tell a difference between the two. You’ve just convinced yourself that apples are superior to doughnuts, so you think you feel better after eating an apple.
Isn’t it kind of scary the amount of power you give to your eating disorder, that it can trick you into believing you look or feel a certain way?
I used to feel tired a lot, and I always blamed it on food. I had too many carbohydrates today. I’ll do better tomorrow.
The funny thing is, I never questioned my eating disorder. I just went along with whatever I was told, never stopping to think, “Perhaps the reason I’m tired is because I had too few carbohydrates today.”
In reality, food plays a small role in how you look and feel. There are many other factors involved that have nothing to do with what you’ve eaten.
If you don’t believe me, think about it this way: if apples and doughnuts were exactly alike in their nutritive content, would you still opt for the apple over the doughnut? Is it really a matter of how you look and feel?
You see, the truth is that your food choices are motivated by fear – a fear of gaining weight. And that fear is what causes you to think food is the source of your problems.
But I’m here to say that food isn’t the problem. It’s never been the problem. The problem is in your own mind. And until you challenge your fear of gaining weight, you will blame everything – a headache, stomachache, etc. – on food.
As you rewire your brain, those fears will subside, along with your increased hyper-awareness around food and your body. It’s a slow, arduous process, but blaming food certainly won’t speed it up.
– Taylor
