If you’re health conscious, recovering from an eating disorder (ED) or generally struggling when dealing with hunger pains, it can be difficult to find the balance between listening to your body and making good choices for yourself. Food being tied to morality with faster options being labelled as “bad” and home cooked options labelled as “good” makes simply eating when hungry feel like an uphill battle. Especially when it comes to food that’s treated like a reward, for instance, a sweet treat, separating what you eat from your own morality is almost impossible.
Once food becomes something other than a means for energy, it’s a quick decline until someone’s punishing themselves for eating or using food as a tool for discipline when it doesn’t have to be that. Restricting food leads to unhealthy thoughts about it. When given dessert with their meal at mealtime, children who don’t consider food as a mode operand to morality tend to wait until after they finish the rest of their plate before touching their sweet treat anyway. This shows that without restriction, people can make choices that are good for them.
As soon as you start eating what you want when you want and listening to your body when you eat, it becomes easier to unlearn this mindset. Paying attention to your mood and energy levels after eating a cookie or piece of cake can give insight into what your body really needs and not what you tell yourself it needs. While unlearning this is easier said than done, it’s not impossible and can lead to a healthier relationship with food and with oneself in the long run.
