7 Effective Tips to Overcome Food Guilt
Nowadays it seems evident that overeating or food guilt is a food disorder of the twenty-first century. Nutritional habits and the importance we give to the physical condition has a psychological impact on us. Overcoming this food guilt when we eat something we “shouldn’t” is now a real problem.
In reality, everything we eat has calories which enter our bodies. Nonetheless, strict diets aren’t good for our health either. And so, some nutritionist and trainers confirm that every once in a while we can eat those guilty pleasures. Here we’ll give you a few tips to overcome food guilt.
Seven suggestions to overcome food guilt
1. Know your physique and limits
The problem with diets is not just staying within the guidelines, but also the type of body you have. Therefore, it’s important to know if your metabolism is fast or slow and if you gain weight easily or not.
If you’re naturally thin, you might not feel the effects of eating fatty or sugary foods. However, even when you gain weight easily, there are ways to balance your diet. Taking control of your nutrition regimen is the first thing you must do.
2. Drink a detox shake the next day
Even if you eat something that was out of your balanced diet plan, there are ways to decrease its effect. And so, to detox the body, you can use certain drinks that’ll help.
Fruits and vegetables such as cucumber, watercress, pineapple, and lime should be in this detox mix. Additionally, include some celery in there as well, and of course, don’t add any sugar to it. This mix will prepare the body to cleanse fats and sugars.
3. Don’t count calories too much to overcome food guilt
It’s true that we are what we eat. However, this is not an exact science, because we’re humans and tend to make mistakes. Additionally, there will always be more formulas to calculate physical condition.
Of course, it’s important to keep track of what you eat and the calories that this represents in your body. But, there should be room for error in every nutritional plan. You should also have some exceptions in your plan.
4. Overcome food guilt by including a cheat day
Diets that include a margin of error in them are better for the users. This is because by allowing one guilty pleasure in the plan, you’ll be more likely to keep going with the regimen. Generally, people who comply with their nutritional plans include one cheat day.
These cheat day or cheat meals, give dieters a resting period to gather their strength to keep going. These stimulate or give some kind of reward for their good behavior. If you manage to lose weight, go to the gym, or eat healthily, you deserve a reward.
5. Go to the gym and burn more calories
In order to overcome food guilt after eating something out of your meal plan, you can solve it by going to the gym. Everything that goes into your body can also exit just as easily. And if the problem is excess calories, well, you can just burn them out. Cardio exercises are great for this.
If we analyze exercise plans carefully, many tend to focus on burning calories before toning the muscles. Basically, after you eat your guilty pleasure food, the best thing to do is run, jog, or any other cardio exercise.
6. Food guilt can actually make you eat more
Overeating due to a bad mood is something that many people do nowadays. Some people fill their emotional voids with food. This indicates that if you feel guilty, then you’re more likely to repeat your error to attempt to feel better. Consequently, falling into a vicious cycle.
Looking at it from this perspective, that guilty feeling you get can only impede your ability to move forward with your diet. And so, the best thing to do is to forget about it, forgive yourself and focus on healthy eating habits. Thus, the idea isn’t to lose motivation because of the error.
7. You’re human: overcome food guilt by not punishing yourself
Lastly, we have to remember that all disciplines will break sometimes. And so, taking care of ourselves is important but punishing ourselves can have negative effects. Therefore, we don’t achieve anything if we have a perfect body but feel frustrated, sad, or depressed.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Isabel Menéndez. Alimentación emocional. Extraído de: http://isabelmenendez.es/libros/ALIMENTACION%20EMOCIONAL%20-%20Isabel%20Menendez.pdf
- Esperanza Dongil Collado; Antonio Cano Vindel. Guía de alimentación PHS Promoción de Hábitos Saludables. Extraído de: http://www.bemocion.mscbs.gob.es/comoEncontrarmeMejor/guiasAutoayuda/docs/guia_de_alimentacion.pdf