The Morality of Food

One thing I hear over and over and over again is “I’ve been good this week” or “I’ve binged on bad foods and feel disgusted with myself.”

This drives me nuts as there are neither good nor bad foods.

A piece of pie doesn’t suddenly grow devil horns and tell you what a rotten person you are and how you’re going to live in hell. At the same time, a carrot doesn’t have angel wings and a halo over its little orange head.

Food is not moral. It’s necessary for life, for our survival, our souls.

Yes, you may talk about food in terms of it having gone bad or being rotten, but that’s it. Other than throwing out moldy onions, I don’t ever want to hear you talk about food in terms of being good and bad again.

Consider this: every time you tell yourself that you’ve eaten bad foods, you hear ‘I am bad’, ‘I am a bad, bad, disgusting, weak person’, ‘I am going to die fat and I’ll never be able to heal my insane relationship with food‘, ‘I am baaad.’

Doesn’t help your self-confidence a lot, does it?

And every time you tell someone else how she has eaten something she shouldn’t have eaten, she hears the exact same words: You are a bad person and you disgust me because of what you eat.

Adding morality to food is always destructive

Yes, there are certain foods that enhance our health and there are foods that rather chip at our metabolism, digestion and assimilation. But it’s the dose that makes the poison.

As an Eating Psychology Coach, I won’t tell you to eat McDonald’s all day long as this will most likely impact your health in a negative way. However, I will also tell you that an occasional burger won’t kill you or impact your well-being massively. I will tell you that eating emotionally is fantastic and that treating yourself here and there is part of being a ‘normal’ eater.

When it comes to food in regards to life and health, it’s about letting go, embracing what you eat and then taking responsibility for it. It’s not about making yourself feel like a serial killer for having eaten an innocent donut. Because, in the end, who cares? Really, who in the world cares?

The food doesn’t, the body doesn’t, and your loved ones don’t care either. If they do, they’re not loved ones.

So, the next time you want to tell your girlfriend how proud you feel because you’ve been eating so goooood lately, stop it and remember that you can never eat ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods as they simply don’t exist.

Tagged as: body, food, Food Obsession, health, morality, self-compassion