It's Time To Change Our Internal Conversation About Food
By Olivia Pfeiffer
TW: This article deals with issues relating to body image and dieting
I think it is time we have a serious conversation about how we view food and our relationship with it, regardless of age and gender. Social media is constantly filled with fitness influencers promoting skinny teas (read: laxatives), #WhatIEatInADay challenges are all over TikTok, and it seems like everyone is on some form of restricted diet. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely all for people wanting to better themselves, especially through healthy eating, but not if that comes from a place of self-hatred or a negative self-image. I can’t say I am offering solutions or a way to fix this completely, but as someone who has struggled with my own relationship with food, here is some advice I can offer. Remember, too, that there are billion dollar industries actively profiting from your negative internal conversations around food, and much of the advertising seen around diets are then profit-based, rather than looking out for your best interests.
1. Remove morality from food - it is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’
If you’re like me, you’ve grown up to see food in two categories: good food (vegetables, fruits, healthy grains, organic meats) and bad food (sugar, carbs, butter/dairy, fatty fried foods). You may be asking yourself—what is so bad if we label foods this way? Isn’t it true some foods are better for you than others? Yes, but the problem with placing moral values on the food that we eat is we then extend that same sort of moral judgement to ourselves. We are ‘good’ when we eat good foods, and therefore we are ‘bad’ when we eat bad foods. Rather than shaming yourself for when you eat ‘bad’ foods, try and ditch the morality labels. Your ice cream pint did not commit a crime, it is not inherently bad and neither are you. As long as you have a certain amount of nutrient-rich food in your diet, you are doing okay.
2. Try to stop seeing it as ‘cheat days’ and ‘on days’
Similar to the point above, the implication that you have ‘cheat days’ where you indulge in food that you enjoy and every other day you eat food that you ‘have to eat,’ you create an unhealthy cycle. It implies that you don’t enjoy eating food for the majority of the week, and one or two days are filled with eating food that you enjoy. In restricting yourself in this way, it creates a cycle where you resent the healthy food you eat and only eat it in order to be able to indulge in brownies on the weekend. Yet healthy food can be absolutely delicious! Cauliflower is completely different from cake, and they provide different amounts of nutrients, but forcing yourself to eat the cauliflower to get to the cake means you will end up hating cauliflower. Changing your thinking from ‘on’ and ‘off’ days and seeing your food consumption as something that changes on a daily basis allows you to enjoy both the cauliflower and the cake for entirely different reasons.
3. Consider switching your vocabulary to ‘plant based’ if you are on any limited meat diet
A friend of mine eats an actively vegetarian diet for the most part. She is passionate about the environment, and when she has the time she enjoys cooking a vegetarian stir fry and vegan cauliflower tikka masala. Yet there’s also been more than one time after a late night out (pre-COVID) that we have ended up splitting a thing of Zilly Fries, bacon and all. Though she normally eats a primarily plant based diet, allowing flexibility and forgiveness if she occasionally eats something with meat products allows her to maintain a happy lifestyle. You can still follow a plant based diet for your own interests in environment and personal health, but allowing yourself space and forgiveness to have more flexibility means you won’t beat yourself up by not following such rigid rules.
