What do we Mean by Unconditional Permission to Eat?
Many of the clients I work with have reached a point where they feel hopeless and confused around food, they are tired of feeling guilty about their food choices and want to finally put an end to years of restriction. I just want to say that if you resonate with any of this, you are not alone and you also do not deserve to keep living by food rules that dictate what, when and how you “should” be eating. In this blog, I will be explaining what unconditional permission to eat means (and what it doesn’t) and why this is paramount to building a positive relationship with food.
What unconditional permission to eat means –
This concept is a key element in one of the ten principles of Intuitive Eating, “Making Peace with Food” and is one that has gained a lot of popularity over recent years and that is misunderstood by many people. Contrary to some popular beliefs, unconditional permission to eat is not as simple as saying “eat all you want, whenever you want”. A key component in this process is body attunement – awareness around our body’s physical sensations. When we give ourselves unconditional permission to eat we are striving to honour our taste buds with foods we like and desire at the time without placing any moral value in our food choices – e.g. we are neither good nor bad, better or worse for choosing pizza over salad. In this process, we also strive to cultivate awareness around our body’s physical cues and states so that we can rely on these to know when we’ve had enough and are satisfied. An important element of intuitive eating is self-care and this also blends into the process of unconditional permission to eat whereby we also consider our body’s nutritional needs as well as, what feels good in our body.
How can unconditional permission to eat help –
Unfortunately, we live in a world that preaches restrictive eating approaches and praises disordered eating behaviours - all of which focus on shrinking our bodies (not health!). We learn to live by food rules dictating what (“good”) foods we can eat and what (“bad”) food we have to stay away from, when it’s okay to eat and when it isn’t, how many calories we should be eating and so on – sounds pretty freaking stressful to have to live this way, doesn’t it? I mean, where is the joy of eating here if we have to follow so many arbitrary rules, or otherwise feel guilty for breaking them? It’s simple, we can’t possibly enjoy food if we’re actively depriving ourselves or feeling guilty because we have eaten something we “shouldn’t” have.
In order to stop swinging from deprivation to feeling guilty, we have to start by ditching all of the food rules and food labels and gradually begin cultivating food neutrality so that we are no longer in deprivation mode.
This is where making peace with food and unconditional permission to eat come in. Giving ourselves unconditional permission to eat what we truly want may sound like an outrageous thing to do and you may be thinking that this will lead to uncontrolled and unstructured eating. This is a very common fear that most of my clients share at the start of this process and it stems from a lack of food habituation – the idea that food becomes less appealing the more you eat it and allow yourself to have it. Dieting does the opposite, it makes certain foods, i.e. forbidden foods, very exciting and appealing simply because we tell ourselves that we can’t have them. When we give in to our cravings and eat the food (e.g. ice-cream), we eat as much as we can (we may reach a point of complete loss of control) due to the anticipation of food restriction, i.e. we know we won’t have access to eating this food again so we better have as much of this food as we can while we can. Now, this shows how deprivation through food restriction backfires and erodes self-trust around food.
Tackling unconditional permission to eat involves removing foods from a pedestal and the labels associated with these foods (and any foods, whether these labels are positive or negative) so that we can start cultivating food neutrality and stop feeling guilty for eating foods we love. It also involves removing any compensatory behaviours evoked from eating certain foods, e.g. I can eat the cake if I go to the gym beforehand. Putting this process into practice will gradually allow us to connect with our eating experiences and discover what we truly like and want, what is satisfying to us and what feels good in our body. Making peace with food will open the door to more flexibility and freedom around our food choices.
If you want to get started in your food freedom journey and make peace with the foods you love in a way that feels comfortable and with the right support to feel empowered along the way, I got you covered. You can find out more here on how I work and what I can offer. I would be delighted to support you in this journey!