Eating Healthy Is Not A Virtue
Fun Fact: Eating a certain way does not make you a good or bad person.
It sounds obvious, but not really when it comes to the endless nutrition do’s and don’t and fear based messaging around “what to eat”. In wellness and weight loss circles, it seems the food police are out in full force like never before.
As a nutrition professional, I think one of the the worst things we can do is get behind anything that’s part of toxic diet culture including:
Feeling shame about what you eat
Equating thinness to health
Demonizing specific foods or whole categories of foods
Low pleasure eating
Restrictive eating
Truthfully, there are no good or bad foods. There are only foods that are supportive to an individual’s physiology or unsupportive.
Sure I’m always going to encourage you to eat more vegetables and less processed foods. But that doesn’t mean we need rigid food rules all the time and forever.
Nothing in life is perfect including our food choices, which are impacted by one’s preferences, circumstances, culture, life experience and so much more.
To reclaim our personal power, we need to stop attaching our sense of who we are to our food choices.
We need to get the “morality” out of food.
Eating more nutritious doesn’t make you a better person and you are not a lesser person if you’re eating something less nutritiously perfect.
Labeling certain foods as “wrong”, “forbidden” or even “sinful” leads to unnecessary stress, unhealthy pre-occupation and has the potential to lead to disordered eating. Fear based restriction often backfires fueling a harmful binge-restrict cycle that hurts us physically, emotionally and mentally.
At the core of my holistic approach to health is cultivating an empowering relationship with food and your body. Mindset about your health is everything.
If your pursuit of health is causing you anxiety and stress, it’s no longer a healthy pursuit.
Food is supposed to be your ally in health – a source of nourishment, pleasure and freedom.
If it’s not, I would love to help you explore what’s standing in the way.
For more on this, check out this week’s podcast:
Episode #100 (woo hoo!)
When Wanting To Eat Healthy Becomes Unhealthy – With Eating Disorder Dietician Jessica Setnick
