How Good & Bad Foods are Inhibiting Your Intuition
Intuitive eating is trendy. Everyone wants to be intuitive, listen to their bodies, live in food freedom, not worry about what they eat, release food shame, and honor their bodies. These are all amazing things to work toward! These things don’t come overnight though and for many people it takes months, maybe years. Let me share a common theme that I see in my work that will 100% hold you back from achieving these goals until you overcome it: labeling foods.
What is labeling foods? Essentially assigning a moral value to foods. This can look like using words such as good, bad, healthy, unhealthy, clean, junk, crap, ok, no-no, sugary, fatty, heavy, light, fattening etc. to define, describe, or categorize a food. For example, “Apples are a light, healthy snack choice while apple pie is sugary and heavy and bad.” As long as you think about and talk about food this way, you’re not going to be an intuitive eater. Why? Because the behavior is going to ultimately dictate your thoughts and feelings about the food before you eat it, when you crave it, after you eat it, or when you restrict it. I encourage you to read through how labeling foods prevents you from making progress in each of the 10 intuitive eating principles. Identify where you’re getting caught up and begin challenging the good & bad food mentality so you can finally start making headway in changing your relationship with food & your body.
**As always, I am here to help you through this process via either one-on-one coaching or my 3-week nutrition course. This is not a simple, straight-forward, linear journey & it’s always nice to have someone in your corner, helping you along the way.**
If you’re labeling foods:
You have not moved past the first step of intuitive eating (IE): rejecting the diet mentality. Eating “good” or “clean” foods is not going to make this the eating plan that “finally works.” You are still living with a diet mentality because you are projecting what dieting says onto foods and you believe it.
You aren’t going to be able to honor your hunger (IE principle 2) because you aren’t going to be able to allow yourself to have the foods you do enjoy or crave without shame or guilt.
You are not making peace with food (IE principle #3). You are stuck in the cycle, conscious or unconscious, of telling yourself which foods you should and shouldn’t have. Food will always be a war within you if you aren’t able to make peace with it.
You definitely aren’t challenging the food police (IE principle #4). You’re supporting your own food rules that are holding you back.
You aren’t going to be able to discover the satisfaction factor (IE principle #5) because you aren’t going to be able to allow yourself to enjoy a food and move on. You’ll continue to feel negatively about the experience which will decrease the overall satisfaction and enjoyment of the food.
You may not be able to feel your fullness (IE principle #6). Because you have strong positive or negative emotions around a food, it will likely cause you to overeat a food you label as “bad” when you “finally give in.”
You may not be coping with your emotions with kindness (IE principle #8). You may be turning to food to address your emotions rather than dealing with them appropriately because food is emotionally good or bad for you.
You may not be respecting your body (IE principle #8). Having a food you consider to be “healthy” or “unhealthy”is going to contribute to superior or inferior feelings about your body. This may lead to restriction or other compensatory behaviors out of hatred for your body either because you feel superior and want to stay “on track” or because you feel inferior and “need to get it together.”
You may not be moving your body joyfully (IE principle #9). Exercise will likely become a punishment or reward for how “bad” or “good” you ate.
You are not going to be able to honor your health with gentle nutrition (IE principle #10). Practicing gentle nutrition requires a lot of work around principles #1-4 at a minimum. You will not be able to tune into how to honor your body with nutritionally sound choices for your unique needs without a diet culture perspective without eliminating labeling foods.