I often admire the way children approach food. They eat when they’re hungry, stop when they’re full, and enjoy a variety of flavors, or in some pickier cases, live off of chicken nuggets and ice cream sandwiches for three years straight. Whether their palates are refined or not, one thing rings true in households where food is plenty: children eat to the point of satiety, and then they move on with their day until it’s time to eat again. It’s a beautiful gig while it lasts, but as we journey on into adulthood, more pressure develops around how we look—which inevitably changes the way we view food.
When constantly confronted with information that deems food as “good or bad,” “clean or dirty,” it’s easy to resort to extremes in the name of health. Unless you’ve got a severe allergy or intolerance to something, food shouldn’t be scary. Demonizing foods is a slippery slope that often leads to a cycle of restriction, binge, and repeat. It usually looks a little like this: You decide to cut out an entire food group, we’ll say sugar. So, you’re on a sugar detox for a week, and all you can think about is that brownie you’re going to reward yourself with when the week is over. Mid-week you’re struggling, so you make sugar-free brownies that taste like cardboard, but hey, you’re sticking to your goal. When the week finally ends, you reward yourself with an actual treat, but instead of one brownie, you end up eating half of the pan. Now you feel guilty, so you consume as much sugar as possible (far more than you would have if you hadn’t restricted in the first place), and start all over again next Monday. Restrict, binge, shame, repeat.
Trusting your body can initially feel scary, but learning to eat without guilt or strict rules is the only way to improve your relationship with both food and body. Back in the day, your brain and your body worked in tandem to provide you with delicious nourishment and handy cues to let you know when you were full. But when you habitually ignore your body’s cues, you enforce unhealthy eating habits that can lead to food obsession, fat gain, and a higher risk of developing an eating disorder.
When you give yourself permission to nourish your body and carefully listen to satiety cues, you’ll realize that your body is not some arch nemesis hell-bent on your demise; it’s on your side. Likewise, food isn’t a supervillain out to get you. Food is just food. With the right choices, high-quality nutrition improves your energy levels, quality of sleep and even your mood! Be watchful of the meaning we attach to food because it fuels our decisions around it. Take your power back by dissolving the pressure to eat a specific way as well as giving yourself permission to eat a variety of things. You’ll most likely find that many of your cravings go away entirely once you remove the restrictions.
Take a page out of the children’s handbook and trust that your body has got you. It wants you to thrive—in fact, all your body does 24/7 is try and keep you alive as long as possible. So enjoy a flavorful meal when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full (no need to finish it all), and give yourself a break from all the rules. Remember, you deserve to enjoy food.
*These thoughts are not meant to diagnose or treat eating disorders and are not a replacement for therapeutic or medical care.