Do you feel guilty after eating? Do you hide your eating because you believe your eating patterns make you defective or less worthy than others?
How about your size?
Do you feel like there is something wrong with you because you live in a larger body? Do you believe you are less worthy of care, attraction, or compassion than others because of your size?
If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you are experiencing guilt and/or shame around your eating and your body.
The problem with feeling guilty after eating
It’s important to understand how you feel about the way you eat because guilt and shame around eating are not helpful.
These feelings can actually lead to:
If you’re struggling with guilt after eating, RSVP for my free Masterclass, “How To Stop Obsessing About Food And Make Consistently Healthy Choices”.
Guilt vs. Shame
Understanding how you feel about your eating patterns, while important, can be difficult because it requires you to closely examine your thought patterns around eating.
How to know if you are struggling with guilt about eating/your body
The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicines Guilt vs Shame infographic describes helpful guilt as a “feeling of psychological discomfort” that occurs when “we act in a way that breaks objective standards of moral behavior”.
The reason guilt isn’t helpful when related to food is that eating is not a moral behavior, and it’s certainly not objective.
Stealing a package off from someone’s front stoop is objectively immoral. (Boo, hiss.)
Eating “too much” mac and cheese… is not.
Even if you don’t agree with me that overeating is immoral (I could argue more but let’s just move on), guilt associated with eating always falls into the “unhelpful guilt” category.
As described in the NICABM Guilt vs. Shame infographic, “unhealthy guilt leads us to emphasize self-punishment over behavior change, trapping us in guilt”.
If your guilt leads you to go on another diet where you remove foods you enjoy and keep yourself hungry… you are effectively punishing yourself.
Another form of self-punishment after eating is self-criticism.
Unfortunately, many times this punishment is marketed as behavior change. But after the initial excitement and dopamine rush of the number on the scale falling… the diet isn’t sustainable and you end up feeling guilty again.
If you’re struggling with guilt after eating, RSVP for my free Masterclass, “How To Stop Obsessing About Food And Make Consistently Healthy Choices”.
How to know if you struggle with shame about eating/your body
Shame occurs when you take your external actions (like overeating) and believe that they say something negative about your identity.
The NICABM infographic describes shame as “an intensely painful feeling of being fundamentally flawed” which is caused by “an innate sense of being worthless or inherently defective”.
Many women feel that their eating patterns of their size mean that there is something wrong with them.
You know you struggle with shame if you believe you are less lovable because of the way you eat or due to your size.
Shame is isolating.
You know you are experiencing shame around eating if you are trying to hide your eating patterns or your body.
Secret eating, throwing wrappers away where others can’t see them, eating in the car are all indicators you feel ashamed of your eating.
If you’re struggling with guilt after eating, RSVP for my free Masterclass, “How To Stop Obsessing About Food And Make Consistently Healthy Choices”.
Overcoming feeling ashamed and guilty after eating
Self-Compassion can be used to heal unhelpful guilt and shame associated with eating.
The 3 elements of self-compassion, as developed by the researcher, Dr. Kristin Neff are:
1. Self-Kindness vs. Self-Judgement
Treating yourself like you would treat a friend is a good place to start. Self-kindness allows you to stop punishing yourself with judgement and criticism when you make a mistake.
2. Common humanity vs. Isolation
Recognizing that your struggle is common and shared by many can help you stop feeling alone and get the help you may need.
One note: many people use the notion that others have their struggle (or worse) as a way to invalidate how much they are struggling. Which leads me to the next point…
3. Mindfulness vs. Over-identification
Recognizing and accepting your struggle, rather than ignoring it or numbing the pain with other vices (emotional eating!) is how you can practice mindfulness.
Over-identification is when you begin to intertwine your identity in your struggle and start to feel like a powerless victim.
If you’re struggling with guilt after eating, RSVP for my free Masterclass, “How To Stop Obsessing About Food And Make Consistently Healthy Choices”.
A more helpful alternative to feeling guilty after eating
If guilt after eating and shame about food and your body are not helpful, how then should you feel about eating?
Neutrality
A big step towards a more helpful relationship with food is going from punishing yourself for eating or feeling like your food choices reflect your identity to just…
Feeling neutral about your food choices.
They are neither good nor bad. Helpful nor unhelpful… they just occur.
You can eat without beating yourself up mentally for it and that is a HUGE win.
Neutrality is a great space to be in on your healing journey when you aren’t at a place where you can think about optimizing your nourishment without falling back into unhelpful thought patterns like All or Nothing thinking caused by a lifetime of dieting.
Neutrality is also a great headspace to occupy when you give yourself permission to indulge, your dessert is neither morally “good” nor “bad”. You get to savor every bite.
Self-Compassionate Curiosity
Self-Compassionate Curiosity is how I help my clients in the Courage to Trust Method approach their relationship with food.
This point of view assumes that every action you take has a reason, usually one that involves self-preservation, and so you can be kind to yourself even when you make choices you wish you hadn’t.
Self-Compassionate curiosity is non-judgemental, it doesn’t assign moral labels to your actions and is a therapeutic presence you can give to yourself.
From this perspective of self-kindness, you then practice curiosity about what need you are trying to meet by eating. Oftentimes this is an emotional need, like needing to numb difficult emotions, or feel comforted.
Once you understand the needs your food choices are trying to meet, you can practice the appropriate self-care (and in some cases discover and overcome your barriers to doing that self-care), so you no longer need food to meet your emotional needs.
If you’re struggling with guilt after eating, RSVP for my free Masterclass, “How To Stop Obsessing About Food And Make Consistently Healthy Choices”.
Dealing with your feelings about food means you no longer need accountability
When you can change the way you think about food and yourself, you will no longer need accountability from an external source (often a coach, Registered Dietitian, doctor, etc.) to make healthy choices.
Self-Compassionate Curiosity allows you to coach yourself and get to the root of any problems that arise. You begin to see emotional food cravings, not as awful tormentors, but as helpful guideposts that clue you in to something being amiss.
You may still need support from time to time to overcome particular barriers, but overall operating from a seat of Self-Compassionate Curiosity empowers you to help yourself as much as possible and more quickly and clearly identify when you do need support.
If you want help to develop self-compassionate curiosity about your food choices so you can learn to care for yourself well, book a free 45-minute Compassionate Clarity call with me and I will assess what you need to reach your goals and if I can help get you there.