In the United States, people have become more conscious of eating healthy to reduce the risk of obesity, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes. A possible negative side effect of those healthy behaviors is food guilt.
Food guilt refers to experiencing stress and guilt after eating certain foods, which can result in anxiety, shame, and unhealthy ways of eating. Read on to learn more about food guilt and get tips to help stop it and restore a more balanced relationship with food.
When a person experiences food guilt, they have feelings of shame about what they’re eating. Food guilt can affect people by increasing negative emotions, especially if they consider the nutritional value of a food to be harmful to their health.
Anecdotally, food guilt can come in various expressions. You might be experiencing food guilt if you:
Apologize about what you’re eating or how much you’re eatingExpress food guilt by saying that you’re guilty about eating certain foodsMake negative statements about yourself—e.g., “I’m so gross”—during or after eating
Feeling guilty about eating food can happen sometimes, which is normal. However, consistently having food guilt is not.
How food guilt comes about can depend on what people consider the basis to be. “As a culture, we’ve fully bought into this myth that if we eat the ‘right’ foods in the ‘right’ amounts, we will achieve the ideal body shape,” Glenys Oyston, RDN, a Texas-based dietitian, told Health. “We’re sure it’s just a matter of trying hard enough.”
Another reason a person might feel food guilt is that eating any “wrong” food isn’t merely unhealthy. Some people may associate eating “wrong” food with a failure of willpower.
Other Feelings You May Have
When you categorize foods as good or bad, you might classify yourself as virtuous or not virtuous, strong or weak, worthy or unworthy. However, an inability to resist forbidden foods isn’t a moral failing; it’s how people are wired.
“Our brains react really strongly to restriction,” Marci Evans, RDN, a dietitian in Cambridge, Mass., specializing in helping patients heal from eating disorders, told Health. “The more we say ‘No, bad’ about a food, the more we can’t stop thinking about it.”
Society’s catalog of “bad” foods has seemingly grown—gluten, red meat, anything in a package—until people have started apologizing for just eating. That thinking can happen even if your reasons for avoiding certain foods seem more concerned with health than weight.
For example, people might avoid dairy products because they experience digestive trouble but decide to eat them after completing a workout session. Oyston called that behavior “healthism,” stating that it’s just another manifestation of our diet mentality. In other words, feeling healthy depends on the activities or habits we associate with being thin.
Some evidence has suggested that shame leads to eating disorders like binge eating. It can also result in emotional eating rather than a healthy eating pattern.
In some instances, obsessing about whether you should restrict your intake of certain foods can be an early sign of a more severe disordered eating pattern. Also, compulsively exercising because you feel you’ve eaten too much or too much of the wrong food is another sign.
“Even if it never gets bad enough to be clinically diagnosable, it’s still a problem when your thoughts about food take up so much mental space that other parts of your life begin to suffer,” Christy Harrison, RD, a dietitian and intuitive-eating counselor in New York, told Health. For example, that problem may occur when you think about an “off-limits” food so much that you miss the fun other people are having at a party.
It may not be easy to get rid of food guilt quickly. Still, the following tips are a few ways to start your journey to stop experiencing food guilt.
1. End the Apology Cycle
If you find yourself apologizing for what you’re eating, figure out how to end the apology cycle. That can look like you becoming more aware of when you’re apologizing or which foods you associate with apologies. Once you end it, you may find that you can enjoy what you consume more without shame—or at least with less of it.
One cool thing about apologizing less out loud is that, over time, I’ve found that my internal monologue has also quieted down. The brownies are just brownies now. I can eat them, love them, and simultaneously have fun at a party.
2. Find Ways To Help Others
You may find yourself being aware of when other people are expressing food guilt. Jenny McGlothlin, a pediatric feeding therapist in Dallas, told Health how to handle those fraught moments when friends bash themselves over their food choices or weight.
“I usually go for a blend of humor and good-natured support,” said McGlothlin. “Like if a friend says she’s ‘being bad,’ I’ll say, ‘Well, you’re pretty awesome, so anything you choose to eat can’t be bad!'”
3. Learn How To Eat Intuitively
You may also eat more intuitively as you work to let go of food shame. Intuitive eating means choosing foods by responding to your body’s needs and wants. Research has found that intuitive eating, in which you respond to your body’s signals for hungry and full, is protective against disordered eating. Intuitive eating can entail:
Allowing yourself to eat more and accept any weight gain that follows once you stop food shaming
Eating when you’re hungry and quitting when you’re full—even if that means you must eat lunch at 11 a.m. or have a second or third helping.
Focusing on something other than the number of calories or the type of food you’re eating. For example, try noticing how your body feels.
Food guilt means obsessively focusing on whether foods are “good” or “bad” and feeling ashamed if you have too much (or any) of the ones you think are wrong. It can lead to unhealthy worry, stress, shame, and potentially disordered eating.
The way to break the guilt cycle, which can also cause you to binge, is to let go of definitions of “good” or “bad” and to practice intuitive eating. That’s when you pay attention to what your body tells you need and what makes it feel good rather than food expectations and rules.
