Taking the Moral Value Out Of Eating

Written by Michelle Shelton

November 4, 2022

Have you ever felt guilty after eating certain foods? Or felt compelled to eat a food because it is “healthy,” even though you don’t really like it? 

Diet culture tells us to avoid specific foods because they will lead to weight gain or poor health. Carbs will make you fat. Fat will make you fat. Eat these 10 foods. Avoid these 12 foods. Replace your meals with protein shakes. Only eat "clean" foods. Only eat organic foods. It's confusing and overwhelming. It turns eating into a moral battleground. 

Moralizing food causes three key challenges. 

Depriving yourself of certain foods or food groups leads to an increased interest and even obsession with that food, making you want it even more. You can successfully avoid it for a time through restrained eating and rigid rules. These rules act as external cues that cut us off from and often conflict with our internal wisdom and body cues. These rules are rigid and don’t fit well with the unpredictable flow of life or with common social practices around eating. Once a rule is broken, or a forbidden food is eaten, the restraint is gone and overeating is all too common as a result. This overeating leads to a belief that you can’t be trusted around the forbidden food, when in fact you are responding in a normal and well documented way to restriction. 

Moralizing foods as good or bad easily leads to feelings of guilt or shame for eating those foods. I ate a “bad” food leads to “I am bad.” Often these feelings of guilt and shame lead to more eating to avoid feeling the guilt and shame. And the cycle continues. My favorite quote from the authors of intuitive eating is, unless you killed the chef, there is no reason to feel guilty over what you ate. You are worthy of love and belonging. Your character is not defined by the nutrition label on your lunch. This is true whether you ate a salad or whether you ate a piece of cake. It is true if you ate two pieces of cake. It is just true. 

When you are overcome with guilt over what you ate, you don't have space to notice if you enjoyed the food, or how you feel after eating it, or if you ate too much or too little and how full you are. In short, you cut off your inner wisdom with the noise from the guilt. If you can replace the guilt with compassion and curiosity, your body has the capacity to tell you all of these things. You will notice, without judgment, how what you ate makes you feel and you can decide if you want to feel that way. You can adapt your eating to nourish your body in a way that helps you feel your best. You can eat just enough cake to enjoy it and set it aside when it stops tasting as good, or when you become full, or when you notice your body responding to the sugar in a way that doesn’t feel good.