Hello;

I am looking for advice on food guilt as i have found myself crippled by it. Its not just with junkfood anymore it has become a little more drastic example of this is if i deviate from having my sandwich and 3 tsp of low fat natural greek yoghurt and eat 2 wholewheat crackers i am convinced i can see the weight it has put on and just feel horrible and depressed for the rest of the day! anyone been/going through this? I am driving my husband insane with this and im worried it will turn into a more sinister problem such as anorexia. Any advise would be appreciated.

Yes I can totally relate. My guilt was crippling and it is a result of overly restricting and making distinctions between good food and bad food. This can and did lead to an eating disorder for me.

Intuitive Eating has helped me neutralize my relationship with food. I don't feel guilty when I eat a brownie but I also don't feel valiant and smug when I eat a salad. I make choices based on what my body wants to eat. It's a way of eating that honors my true needs rather than honoring some preconceived diet notions.

So if you find yourself consumed with guilt over eating,obsessed with tracking your food/weight/exercise and wallowing in body image issues then check out some of the IE threads, disordered eating cannot be fixed with a diet.

Some people think that IE is not really for weightloss but I've lost almost 20lbs since I started in February.

What works for me is just trying to eat healthy and being reasonable. Also, being comprehensive with myself and don't beat myself down over food. I used to try and achieve perfection and it caused me to feel anxious, hungry and annoyed all the time. Now i've made the decision to never stop eating healthy, which means that even when i binge eat or eat in a way that makes me feel sick or isn't good for me (not that frequent anymore) i just go back to eating what makes me feel good in reasonable amounts. Exercising helps me a lot too, and i sometimes will do a bit more if i feel i ate too much.

The thing is... i used to be on a diet all the time and it made me lose touch with my body, my feelings of being satisfied, sensations of hunger, etc. I could never trust myself to eat a little more or a little less because i was just following a program and never my gut feelings and sensations. When you say you feel guilty even when you eat 2 crackers it reminds me of myself when i was sure that there was a formula that defined what and how much i should eat regardless of the circumstances and whether i was truly hungry or not. In my opinion, that's not healthy, its diet mentality. Weight varies from one day to the other. Sometimes we eat more, sometimes we eat less. You may want to have a piece of cake at a party or you may not want to have turkey at the holidays. Its healthy to be flexible with your eating habits, its part of being thin, losing weight and keeping it off. The things is people tend to be either 8 or 80, i know i was.

Great advise thank you. This is going to sound horrible but im glad there is other people out there that have been through this and come out the otherside its comforting.