Beginning to Heal Food Guilt & Shame

When I’m working with someone on healing from emotional eating, an eating disorder, and body-image struggles in my therapy practice, healing the underlying guilt and shame is always a significant part of the process. Guilt and shame are two of the most common uncomfortable emotions that seem to overwhelm and plague those who encounter challenges with food and body-image.

So many people struggle with emotional eating, eating disorders, and body-image challenges, and when we first begin the work the therapy, their struggles and patterns with food feel impossible to change. When beginning the work it feels impossible to imagine that there is a path towards healing these patterns, and therefore, to healing the extremely uncomfortable emotions of guilt and shame.

All of our emotions are messages about how we are experiencing, or responding to the present moment. There are no good or bad emotions, although some are far more desirable to experience, and some are so uncomfortable that we subconsciously work really hard to not have to feel them. 

Some emotions we experience are congruent with our current experience and others are not. Guilt and shame are emotions that tend to be old, and not necessarily congruent with what is happening in the present moment. When we break it down to the root of these emotions, the message of guilt is “I did something wrong", and the message of shame is “I am something wrong.”

We can liken the experience of feeling guilty as a message from our conscience. If we did something wrong our conscience wants us to make it right, this is really useful, but only when it’s congruent with our present experience. If we ate something we deem as “bad” that does not mean we did something wrong, that does not warrant the discomfort of guilt. Shame goes deeper, Brene Brown defines it as, “Shame is that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough.” When we are experiencing guilt, we can examine it and understand fairly easily whether or not it’s congruent with our present experience. However, shame is much more uncomfortable, and more challenging to cope with for most of us.

When we experience shame, we often experience many uncomfortable emotions at the same time. When experiencing shame, there are often feelings of loneliness, isolation, and sadness as well. If shame is experienced internally as, “there is something wrong with my very being itself,” if shame is saying, “I’m small, flawed, and not good enough,” then in that moment, I’m experiencing myself as deeply unworthy. When we’ve experienced shame as a result of childhood trauma, or any trauma really, it becomes difficult to not get stuck in a shame spiral.

Many people I work with experience frustration in relation to their patterns with food. Those who struggle with binge-eating, or with feeling powerless to stop eating when they are full, or any other disordered patterns, often express feelings of guilt and shame. If guilt is experienced, we can break it down together in therapy sessions. We can explore, what is the guilt about? Did you actually do something wrong? We can then work to reframe the guilt. When it’s reframed into an opportunity to see how there can be something learned from this experience, that when I’m feeling out of control with food like this in the future, what small steps can be taken to begin to alter this pattern. Through verbal processing and reframing we can search for ways to find more grace, compassion, and therefore greater self-awareness, which is healing. When we apply curiosity to the guilt, it can be released, and we can have a greater understanding of why it happened in the first place. Once there is greater self-awareness and self-compassion, it becomes more likely that we can have the ability to handle a future similar circumstance with food more mindfully. When we can reframe the guilt, and recognize that “I didn’t do anything wrong, I can learn from this,” we feel empowered, hopeful, and more certain of our ability to change. 

When people struggle with this process of healing food and body-image challenges, and they feel it’ll be impossible to change, I prompt them to consider a time when something seemed impossible, and yet they did learn it, and now it comes easily and naturally. Examples often include riding a bike, rollerskating, learning an instrument, a new skill at work, and so on. Most people can identify with this ability, and it becomes an anecdote for the guilt. When you heal your guilt, there is more room for self-compassion, more willingness to use challenges and struggles as learning opportunities rather than it becoming a shame spiral. 

If the initial internal response of guilt with food struggles can be caught, reframed, and worked through in an empowering way, most people feel hopeful and ready for the challenge of learning new ways of being with food, their bodies, and themselves. They can trust that it may be daunting, however, it’s not impossible. Unfortunately, if it has been internalized over and over and over again that “I did something wrong, (guilt)” so therefore, “I’m a bad person, there’s something wrong with me (shame),” this internalized guilt becomes shame. The shame then becomes a dark cloud of pain inside and all around you. If you have experienced trauma in the past, then the shame can often feel familiar, and can lead to a state of internal suffering, anxiety, and depression, as well as an increased likelihood of an eating disorder. Shame is not logical, it’s a felt inner experience of deep pain and suffering.

Healing shame starts with naming the shame for what it is. Understanding and exploring where you picked up the negative internalized belief that “I am something wrong” in the first place is essential to healing. Healing shame begins with talking about it, naming it, and allowing ourselves to truly feel it, to learn from it, to hold it with curiosity and compassion. Only then can we begin to learn what the negative internalized beliefs are that we picked up, such as, I am unworthy, I am not good enough, I am unlovable, (just to name a few) and to heal where these beliefs were created or reinforced. EMDR therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), traditional talk therapy, and many other beneficial therapeutic styles, can all help work through the traumas and experiences that have created or reinforced these negative beliefs. Through the therapeutic process you can call out the shame for what it is, work through it, and ultimately heal it. 

Shame is one of the most painful, and therefore one of the most likely emotions to be avoided. It takes time to learn about your personal experience of shame. To understand where you picked it up, to identify how you experience it mentally, physically, and emotionally is essential. Be patient with yourself as you learn the process of listening to your body, to your internal language, and your true self. You then can benefit from developing an awareness of your personal window of tolerance. How long can you sit with the shame before it feels as though you want to eat, restrict, check-out, numb-out, or escape altogether? This is all helpful information, best when experienced and worked through in therapy. Learning how to be with yourself within your window of tolerance allows you to grow. Know that you are learning the new and difficult skills of emotional awareness and emotional experiencing. This is not easy work. Please be patient with yourself. Just like riding a bike or roller skating, emotional awareness and experiencing are worthwhile skills to stick with, although you might get a little scuffed up along the way. Once you learn the skills and integrate them, these new ways of being with food, your body and yourself, will be yours to keep.

One thing I know for sure after talking to people in a therapy setting for more than twenty years, is that no one gets to escape feeling pain and discomfort in this life. I also know for sure that no one deserves to live in a state of shame, especially those who struggle with food and body-image struggles. Once you can understand and release your shame, reframe any guilt experienced in the moment, you will see the new learning that can take place. Once you feel a sense of hope, you can see it as a skill that you just don’t know yet, but you can learn how to be mindful and intuitive when it comes to your food choices. With this hard work you move from shame toward self-empowerment. Ultimately, the goal of healing is to feel that you are always, unconditionally worthy. The goal of healing is to know that you are the expert on what your body wants and needs, and that you are enough—now, in this present moment, just as you are existing as you. 

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 10: Honor Your Health - Gentle Nutrition

The tenth principle of Intuitive Eating is: Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition. When working through, integrating and processing the other nine principles of Intuitive Eating, you will find there is nothing prescriptive about what to eat. When you are immersed in the process of intuitive eating, you are the expert on what your body wants and needs.

The more you tune into your body, develop awareness and pay attention to the cues and signals from your body, the more you know what foods serve your body and your mind and what foods do not. You know how you feel when you overeat, under eat and when you’ve eaten just what your body and mind needs. The truth is that there is no one right way for everyone to eat. Foods that might make one person feel great might make another feel terrible. When you are intuitively eating you are able to make these assessments and make choices based on what is best for your body.

One of the most challenging elements of intuitive eating is developing the ability to trust yourself with food. To not just know what your body wants and needs, but to feed your body what it wants and needs. If you have a long history of dieting, most likely you feel that certain trigger foods create an automatic response to eat them or overeat them and that pulls you away from the attunement you’ve worked to create with your body. This causes uncertainty and keeps your relationship with food in a challenging space. When you let yourself eat what your body wants and needs you will listen to the subtle and the obvious cues your body sends you about the foods you eat. The key is to remain mindful and tuned into your body in order to consistently make the choices that serve your body.

When you are fully in tune with your body’s wants and needs you know what makes you feel good in mind body and spirit. This is where the gentle nutrition element comes in within this process of intuitive eating. Our bodies are designed to assimilate the nutrients from whole foods. We need protein, vitamins, minerals, fats, fiber and carbohydrates to be well, feel well and live well. Your body is literally made up of the food that you eat. Your food becomes your cells, tissues and organs, the more nutrient dense your diet, the more these cells, tissues and organs will thrive. The more that your body thrives the more energy, vitality and mental wellbeing you will experience.

When you honor your health, you begin to focus on what to eat, not what not to eat. When you live in a mindset of nourishment and honoring your health, you focus on ensuring that you provide your body with the nutrients it needs on a daily basis—through the foods that you eat—so that you can truly feel vital and healthy in mind, body and spirit.

When you consider what you typically eat in a day, you might note where the nutrients that your body needs to thrive are coming from? How many servings of vegetables, fruits and plant-based foods are you taking in every single day? When you construct a way of eating that focuses on what to eat versus what not to eat, you can ensure that you satisfy your taste buds and your body. When you consider how you will nourish yourself and feel well daily and follow through with how you want to feel, you will create a sense of accomplishment and feel the difference in how your body functions and feels every day. 

When you are eating plenty of veggies, fruits, seeds, nuts, proteins and making them taste delicious with lively herbs and spices, you will feel satisfied and satiated. When you feel satisfied and satiated you experience fewer cravings and notice when cravings are emotionally driven more easily. When you focus on what to eat and not what not to eat, naturally you will fill your plate with more nutrient dense foods and there just won’t be the same space for less nutrient dense foods.

This is not about perfection or feeling guilty if some of the things you choose to eat are not super nutrient dense. You will not become nutritionally deficient from one meal or snack; the focus is more about the daily choices you make over time. This process is about focusing on nourishing your body. There may be room for snacks and treats that are not super nutrient dense, however, if you know that you are feeding your body what it needs to thrive, you will begin to create more balance and feel in tune and make choices based on what your body wants versus what you might be craving.

When you are eating well you will feel well. When you are eating mostly junky processed foods devoid of nutrients you most likely will feel junky. When you are eating in a balanced and nonrestrictive manner you will feel more balanced. When you focus on how you want to feel the choices become more and more evident when you are considering what to eat, how to construct a meal and how each choice you make when it comes to food can reflect and support how you want to feel in mind, body and spirit.

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Principle 7 of Intuitive Eating is: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness. This is a big one—and one of the most challenging as emotions and food often get entangled. It can be much more challenging to discern emotional eating from say a hunger or full cue as you are working with the principles of intuitive eating. Emotional eating can also become tangled up in specific thought pattern or a belief (or lie) about a diet as you are working to reject diet mentality.

Coping with your emotions with kindness allows an opportunity for food to be just food. It’s another simple but not so easy concept as you are working towards not using food as a coping skill to manage your internal emotional experiences that create discomfort and challenges. This process of coping with emotions with kindness is about understanding, listening to, receiving the messages from and responding to your emotions in a nonjudgmental and compassionate way.  This process really allows you to delve deeply into the root of emotional eating.

Many of us learned very early in our lives to believe and feel that our emotions are invalid, inconvenient, dramatic or unnecessary based on how they you were treated when expressing your emotions as a child. If you heard, “you’re too sensitive” “you’re so dramatic” “I don’t have time for this (temper tantrum, crying spell and so on…” “I’ll give you something to cry about” “crybaby” or “turn on the tears and see if you get your way” just to name a few, then you were taught a negative message about feeling and expressing your emotions. This becomes the root of emotional eating (or any other negative coping pattern).

These statements are unfortunately quite common, and all are quite damaging, especially when heard repeatedly. It begins to feel futile or unsafe to express your feelings and then eventually you either up the expressions in an attempt to be heard or stop and cut yourself off from you emotions all together.

The point here is definitely not to place blame, that just creates a sense of being a victim and creates a feeling of helplessness. The point here is to allow yourself to understand where you picked up the belief that your emotions were not valid, inconvenient etc... The point is to develop awareness as to where your relationship to your emotions became uncomfortable or all together denied. When you avoid or deny yourself the experience of feeling your feelings, you learn to stuff, numb, suppress and repress your emotions rather than express them in a healthy manner. You deserve to feel all of your feelings and all of your feelings are valid. Period. However, what you do with them and how you respond to your emotions can make a huge impact on the quality of your life.

If you feel completely at a loss when it comes to naming, understanding, identifying and exposing your emotions, that is ok! You can do an internet search for a feelings wheel and download and print it out to begin to become more familiar with emotions in general. This process can feel daunting at first because if you learned to repress your feelings from a young age you most likely have been working hard to keep them deeply suppressed, locked away deep inside never to be seen again. However, feelings don’t just go away, they are all still there and ready for you to open yourself to understanding, accepting and managing them in healthy way. I recommend you use the following process to begin the process of becoming more comfortable with your feelings/emotions simply as a concept. Then you can begin to explore your own in relation to your life more in depth. 

To start, go through the feelings wheel and list each feeling in a journal, one by one, starting at the center of the wheel. Write down after the feeling name a time you remember feeling that way or something that might create that feeling inside you. Then write down where you feel that feeling in your body (it’s ok if this isn’t clear right away, just try). Write down the opposite feeling state (e.g. angry—peaceful, happy—sad) for each feeling. After completing this exercise with all of the feelings on the wheel, use this journal daily as a place to release your feelings.

Our feelings/emotions show up as a message about how we are experiencing our lives. They are incredibly valuable information. It’s super important to use the concept of nonjudgment with your emotions/feelings. When you categorize your feelings as good or bad you are more likely to attempt to avoid the “bad” feelings. However, if you are nonjudgmental in your view of your emotions they can be more accessible to understand.

Your feelings may be experienced as comfortable or uncomfortable. It’s human nature to want to avoid feeling uncomfortable. As you become more familiar with feeling states, it will be helpful to begin to get more comfortable with the discomfort of your emotions. This is where your feelings journal will be helpful. You can use the following exercise to more clearly understand and then release your feelings. Try using the process each day to reflect on an emotional experience you had (or are having) and write down:

• Name the emotion you are experiencing/experienced.

• Where do/did you feel this in your body?

• How uncomfortable is/was this feeling on a scale of 0-10? (0 being no distress present and 10 being as uncomfortable as possible)

• What messages did you receive about this feeling growing up (or in your current life)?

• What is the message this emotion has for you now, what does it want you to know?

• What does this feeling/emotion need?

• Can you give the emotion what it needs, why or why not?

• Is there something you can do to cope with this feeling in a healthy way?

• Can you let this feeling go/release it?

• What is the opposite feeling state?

• Is it possible to do something now to cultivate this opposite feeling state in this moment?

• How uncomfortable is your original feeling now on a scale of 0-10?

After going through this daily as an exercise in self-awareness and self-reflection, begin to apply it to when you are having a specific food craving. Notice if you are able to release the feelings in a healthy way, trusting that this becomes more comfortable and possible with practice.

Emotional awareness is a process and learning to identify and cope with your feelings can have a tremendously positive impact on your life, your relationships, and your relationship with food. As you open yourself to the inner workings of your emotional world, you begin to free and liberate yourself from any fear and shame you experienced in terms of expressing your feelings in your past.

Know that this is just the beginning. If you feel there is too much to uncover, it’s difficult to get in touch with your feelings or they have been too suppressed for too long, know that you can seek support, you do not have to go through this hard work alone. Find a therapist, a coach or a trusted mentor and receive the support you need. This work is tremendously powerful and you deserve to feel, appreciate, understand and experience all of your feelings.