A common question I get from clients is how to move past the guilt they feel when eating certain foods. In almost every scenario, the foods they feel guilt about eating are things which they enjoy and want to be able to have on occasion, but don’t feel they should be “allowed“ to have. No one ever feels guilty after eating nutrient dense foods like veggies and lean protein... The foods that cause guilt are typically processed / packaged or higher calorie / less nutrient dense. However, they can certainly also include very nutritious foods which, somewhere along the way, diet culture deemed inappropriate to consume (things like bread, nuts, and bananas, just to name a few common ones). Regardless of what the specific struggle food(s) are, the fear of eating them and guilt that follows is solely about the physical repercussions we falbelieve will occur (we think they will hinder us from our weight loss or weight maintenance goals). Let’s cover the spiritual side, the practical side, and how to reframe things so you can walk in victory and enjoy these food with NO guilt!

The Spiritual Side:
God’s ultimate design for us as believers is to operate from a place of faith—not fear—in every area of our life. Our eating decisions are no different! Many of us don’t see our food-related struggles as spiritual attack, but I’m here to tell you that the enemy comes at women hard in the area of health and body image because we are sus to it. It’s an easy target precisely because we don’t see it as a spiritual battle. Please hear me when I say I’m not hyper-spiritualizing things. Anything that hinders us from walking unencumbered can be traced back to the enemy. Satan comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but the Lord would have us live from a place of freedom and abundant life (John 10:10). Getting to a place where we no longer feel fear or guilt around any food is an important part of that freedom. When we allow ourselves to feel guilt that has no place, Satan will use it to come at us with shame, and that ultimately leaves us feeling defeated and even more vulnerable. We must not give him a foothold that eventually leads to a stronghold. Eating should be enjoyable, not stressful! Guilt and shame have no place at the table. When they come knocking at your door, don’t pull up a seat and invite them in.

The Practical Side:
I appreciate that some foods might be more nutritious than others, however, there’s no such thing as a “good” or a “bad” food. Those labels are diet culture—even the enemy himself—and this is exactly where guilt is stemming from. In other words, Satan uses culture to weave lies into an aspect of practical truth. He loves to blur lines in order to create false belief systems. Inside his agenda, the practical side of the impact nutrition has on our health was distorted to “good” vs “bad” foods. As a result, when we eat a food which we have labeled as “bad,” we then transfer that “bad” label to ourselves. This is not the Lord’s design for us when it comes to partaking of His gift of food or faithful stewardship of our bodies. With that said, let’s remove morality from our food choices shall we? So how do we do this? How do we overcome Satan’s use of diet culture against us? In my opinion… The only way around is through. Meaning, we just keep factoring them into our overall plan and eventually the repeated exposure will help to dissipate these feelings of guilt and fear. The great thing about budgeting them in and still seeing progress is that it will help you understand they aren’t actually worth the mental energy of stressing over. If anything, allowing yourself the small bit of “nutritional relief” will help you stay on plan much more consistently because you won't dread what you eat—you’ll look forward to it! Being too restrictive and not enjoying your food is a recipe for a larger binge later on. We can only handle deprivation for so long before the pendulum swings the opposite way. So better to include them in moderate quantities here and there to prevent diving headfirst into #AllTheThings later on.

Reframing Things:
Remember that all foods are simply carbs, fat, and protein—sweets or packaged snacks (common foods with the “bad” label) are no different. When you view them that way, you can shift your perspective to see how they actually help you hit your macronutrient goals. When you plan them in, they become part of the plan instead of a deviation from it. This helps further remove the idea that you are “breaking the rules.” Healthy guardrails and boundaries with food are important, but “rules” around food are a harmful dieting mentality stemming from fear rather than freedom. They perpetuate the idea that we are either “on plan” or “off plan.” Can you see how guilt would follow?

Victory Through Building Self-Trust:
Unless a food should be avoided for medical reasons (or has physical consequences to something like your energy or digestion that legitimately makes eating it not worth the consequences), there’s no reason to set anything “off limits.” That just puts the food on a pedestal and creates a situation where you don’t trust yourself around it. It perpetuates all-or-nothing thinking, and a deprive-then-binge cycle. The solution is, as noted above, to keep exposing yourself to these foods, specifically by eating them in a way that stays within healthy guardrails (i.e. pre-determined quantities and frequencies). Self-trust is built with repeated events of successful exposure which create a show of evidence that you can have them without over-indulging. The more often you eat a food, the less enticing it becomes. Eventually, it becomes no big deal, you get to a place where you could take it or leave it, and the food is no longer a trigger. It takes time and practice, but give yourself grace and know that it works! Getting to this place is so worth the effort it takes on the front end... it is work that once finished, never has to be done again!

Victory Through The Spirit:
Make it a habit to thank the Lord for the foods that you are working on freedom with before partaking in them and for His wisdom as to how doing so actually serves to create freedomespecially freedom from guilt. This will help you in a couple of ways. First, you’re more likely to stay within your healthy guardrails when consuming them when you’ve made the experience about God’s gift of enjoying food. Remember, we have tastebuds for a reason! Second, it helps us to reframe the consumption of these foods as a normal part of eating vs attaching those negative labels to the food

If you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns, feel free to comment below, or reach out to me by emailing me at Kaci@DashingDish.com any time!

| Kaci