Why Do I Feel Guilty After Eating? Understanding and Overcoming Food Guilt
First things first, feeling guilty after eating really sucks. In a world where it’s normal to joke about how much we regret what we ate over the weekend and hear people laugh about how they “shouldn’t have eaten that”, it can be easy to invalidate ourselves when it comes to food guilt. We may tell ourselves that feeling anxious after eating is just part of being human and not a huge deal. We may even be convinced our food guilt is a good thing and helps to keep us on the straight and narrow.
But here’s what I know from being a dietitian with the absolute honour of seeing behind the curtain: feeling guilty or anxious after eating can feel dark and heavy in a way that we rarely talk about. It can make life feel small and bleak.
On some level we may believe that if we just ate perfectly enough, we could evade food guilt for good and finally find some peace. But overcoming food guilt isn’t actually about what we eat.
Thinking that we can eat “perfectly” and avoid anxiety about food is akin to telling someone who’s walking on a tightrope 20 feet off the ground to just make sure not to lose their balance and they’ll be fine. What would bring them a true sense of safety is helping them get to more stable ground. Let’s look at what that more stable ground is when it comes to food guilt…
So, why do I feel guilty after eating?
Food guilt holds an emotional role in your life
When we find ourselves hyper-fixating on food, I believe it’s often helping us to feel safe in some way. At its core, disordered eating and eating disorders are trying to offer people reprieve from emotions that feel really big and uncomfortable.
When a person’s inner world feels overwhelming, food can provide something external that offers a sense of empowerment, a feeling of numbness, a feeling of order, or a feeling of being enough. When we are healing our relationship with food, we are often taking away a really effective coping strategy and exposing what is underneath.
I say this so you know that for most people, there are many layers underneath food guilt. So if you’re feeling like you can’t just snap your fingers and will the food guilt away, that makes sense and you are not alone.Diet culture is the air we breathe
There are whole books written about this, so I will do my best to be concise! From the time we are born, we absorb the message that some bodies are better than others, that we can’t trust our appetites, that some foods are good and some foods are bad. The scariest part is that it’s the air we breathe, so we don’t necessarily question whether it’s true or fair or helpful.
Let’s do a quick experiment. Let’s say we are trying to brainstorm morning snack options and I propose “carrots and hummus”. Feel the reaction in your body. Now say I propose a morning snack of “chocolate and chips”. Is the reaction in your body the same? If not, what type of beliefs pop up about chocolate and chips? How often do you think you should have them? What time of day do you think is okay to eat them?
I give this example to demonstrate that we don’t have to be “on a diet” to be impacted by diet culture and perceive foods as existing in different categories. It is not your fault if you carry a lot of negative associations to food. It’s a direct by-product of the culture we live in, and the industry that works to keep it running.
You may be wondering, how does nutrition fit into all this? For now, I can assure you that trying to see all foods as morally neutral (aka not good or bad), does not mean never incorporating nutrition knowledge into your food choices - it means coming from a place of kindness and flexibility instead of judgement and rigidity. Not to mention, guilt is not good for us!You are in a body that the world oppresses
Anyone in any body can struggle with their relationship with food and body image, and everyone’s internal challenges are so important. AND, we know that not every body faces the same reaction from the external world. Whether implicit or explicit, someone in a big body eating fast food is going to get different reactions than someone in a thin body. Someone in a big body putting food on a grocery conveyor belt is going to get different reactions than someone in a thin body. Someone in a big body ordering a meal at a restaurant is going to get different reactions than someone in a thin body.
In many ways, the world demands fat people feel guilty for their food choices. And of course the problem needing fixing here is not fat bodies, it’s anti-fatness. I highly recommend the work of Aubrey Gordon (Your Fat Friend) for more on this topic.You are under-nourished
When we aren’t eating as much as our body would like, our brains are hard-wired to fixate on food - it’s what Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani calls the “caveperson brain”. It can feel like a negative spiral where the more you restrict, the more obsessed you feel with food and eating “perfectly”, which often fuels more restriction.
The other side of the coin is that when we begin nourishing ourselves, sometimes we see the volume of food guilt start to decrease on its own.
What to do when you regret eating something
Get curious about the guilt
Because of how uncomfortable it is to be in the thick of food guilt, often our first inclination is to shove it away. If only that made guilt subside. Instead, when we try to lock guilt outside of the house, it tends to only knock harder and harder (analogy inspired by this beautiful Rumi poem).
When we are able to get curious about it, we can learn so much. Here are a few questions I encourage you to ask yourself in a moment of calm:What does the soundtrack in my head sound like when I’m sitting in regret after eating? Is it related to my body size? Is it related to my health? Is it related to my sense of self-control or worth as a human?
Which foods feel safest to me and tend to bring up the least anxiety, and which foods feel scariest and tend to bring up the most anxiety? What type of beliefs do I hold about these foods? Where did I learn these beliefs?
What’s the state of my nervous system when my regret after eating is the loudest? Does the food guilt tend to come on strongest when I am lonely? Anxious? Sad?
Learn to be a diet culture detective
One of the ways that diet culture is incredibly sneaky is that it becomes difficult to decipher which thoughts are coming from diet culture and which thoughts are coming from our true selves. Let’s start by naming some characteristics of diet culture that will help us to spot it out in the wild:
Characteristics of diet culture:
It’s judgemental and implies right and wrong
It encourages us to look outward, not inward, for answers
It never lets us feel good enough right now, as we are
It convinces us that our bodies will not self-regulate if not controlled
As a first step, it is empowering to start noticing when you see diet culture in your day to day. Think back to this past week… can you think of any times that food and bodies were referred to in ways that match the diet culture characteristics above? Here are a few examples in my own life recently:
Reading a fiction book with random criticisms of the characters’ food choices and bodies
Listening to a podcast by someone I deeply admire with random jokes about how the scale dictates the tone of her day
Seeing a magazine in the grocery store check out with the headline “Fill Up To Slim Down”
When we practice noticing diet culture retroactively, it develops the muscle that helps us to notice it in real time. And the more we notice it, the more we can call it out!
Remember the difference between guilt and guilt-in-disguise
I recently heard Dr. Becky Kennedy talk about “true guilt versus not guilt” and it was game-changing for me. Glennon Doyle summed up the concept in her own way beautifully on her podcast:
“...there’s two kinds of guilt. And one of them is you did something wrong and something against your values. That’s a good kind of guilt. You’re like, “Oh, this feels bad because it went against my values.” There’s another kind of guilt where you went with your values, but you went against the cultural value(...)”
- Glennon DoyleI love this distinction. Guilt is a useful emotion to tell us when we went against our values, and helps us to change our actions in a way that is more aligned with those values.
Example: I lied to a friend and feel guilty about it because lying is not in line with how I want to live. This guilt alerts me that next time I want to have a hard conversation with my friend instead of lying.
On the other hand, standing up for myself in a way that makes someone else feel uncomfortable might feel a lot like guilt, but might actually be discomfort with doing something new…. something that is actually what’s best for me and how I want to live.
With food, eating certain foods (or quantities) may bring up something that feels a heck of a lot like guilt, but making sure you’re calling it out NOT as an indication that you’re doing something wrong, but as an indication that you’re doing something new or something that the culture identifies as wrong is really empowering.Ground your body
When it comes to changing our relationship with food, often we hear about how to change our thoughts around food. Which is great and important.
But taking steps to signal safety to our body and nervous system is also so important. When our bodies are dysregulated, the donuts we just ate can truly feel like a saber-tooth tiger chasing us, as far as our bodies are concerned.
This is a great area to explore with a therapist, or through books and podcasts.Get support
Whether it is through blogs, podcasts, books, Reddit subs, therapy and dietitian support… doing this healing work with people who get it makes a hard journey feel a bit less hard.
Are you looking for dietitian support? I offer virtual nutrition counselling to adults in Ottawa and the rest of Ontario.
Learn more about my services.This blog post is not a substitute for personal eating disorder care and is intended for educational purposes only.
