4 CLEANING UP THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD

‘You are what you eat, so don’t be fast, cheap, easy or fake.’

THE INTERNET

‘You are what you eat, so own it and enjoy it.’

Imagine eating a burger, fries and a milkshake. What words and emotions spring to mind when you think about this scenario? Some might say ‘delicious’, ‘treats’, ‘indulgence’. Many would probably say ‘unhealthy’, ‘guilt’, ‘shame’, ‘regret’, ‘fattening’ or ‘gross’.

The language we use to describe food is important, but it’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough. The way we eat is part of our identity, because the food we eat becomes us: our bones, our muscles, our adipose tissue, our neurons – everything. Everything we eat is converted into our bodies.

So, by that extension, the way we describe food and the way we feel about food is mimicked in the way we feel about ourselves. If we use negative language to describe food, we attribute those words to ourselves as well, and considering most of the population has a negative body image, we don’t need to add to this.

Having negative associations with foods can lead to feelings of anxiety or guilt at having eaten them, as well as thoughts of how to compensate for this behaviour: skipping the next meal, eating a lot less the next day, doing an extra workout or even purging. These are not healthy food behaviours.

The language we use to describe food affects not only us but also those within earshot of our conversations. Loudly proclaiming, ‘Oh God, I’m being so bad today by eating this cake’ may decrease not only your enjoyment of the cake, but also that of the person sitting at the next table, who, up until that point, was feeling totally fine about eating cake. If someone near you is more vulnerable to these kinds of comments, you could be negatively affecting their mental health.

Some of the words we so easily use to describe food could very well be having a detrimental effect on our health. In our quest to be healthy, we often use very unhealthy language. This is especially the case in the diet industry. There is a fine line between promoting a healthy diet (a good thing) and causing anxiety over foods (definitely not good).

We can’t escape metaphors in our lives. For example, money is used as a metaphorical source for time: we spend time, save time, and waste it. This in turn affects how we perceive time and how we behave towards it – we act as if time is something tangible, valuable, measurable and divisible. Motivational videos will take this one step further and tell you that if you received £86,400 every day, how would you spend it, knowing it would disappear at the end of the day? You wouldn’t waste it, so why are you wasting the 86,400 seconds you have every day of your life? It implies that each second is equally valuable.

We use the language of eating as a metaphor for how we interact with the world around us. For example:

• ‘You look so pretty I could just eat you up.’

• ‘He has bitten off more than he can chew.’

• ‘I am always hungry for new experience.’

• ‘A feast for the eyes.’

• ‘I have acquired a taste for skiing.’

Desire is hunger, so satisfying desire is eating.63

We use food metaphors in everyday life to explain phenomena such as ambition and desire, but we also use religious and moral metaphors and concepts to describe food. As we saw in the first chapter, religious discourse is rife in both the diet and wellness industry, employing words such as ‘sinful’, ‘guilt-free’, and ‘clean’ to provoke feelings of righteousness and/or disgust in eating habits. The best example I can think of is Slimming World and ‘syns’. Ugh. What a horrible word, to imply that eating food is a sin.

I want to focus on a few of the terms that I believe should be banished from our vocabulary when it comes to talking about food. I believe these words and phrases have no place in our food conversations, and that despite their potentially harmless appearances, these words are insidious and negatively affect our health.

Clean eating

Clean eating epitomises the idea of ‘You are what you eat’. If you eat ‘clean’ you are a clean person. By extension, if you don’t eat ‘clean’ you must therefore eat dirty and be a dirty person.

The contents of the diet vary from person to person when eating ‘clean’, and are arguably irrelevant. The term has been adopted so widely, by people promoting so many different eating choices, that it has no agreed-upon definition. I don’t care whether eating clean means vegan to one person, avoiding processed foods to another, and eating paleo to a third. What eating clean includes doesn’t matter, because it’s the very use of language and the morality it imparts on the person that matters here. By simply using the word ‘clean’, it implies you are therefore better than someone else.

The notions of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ are strongly tied to notions of right and wrong. Across human societies, bodily purity seems deeply intertwined with morality. You physically wash away your sins to become clean again. I think we can all agree that describing the complexity of sexuality as ‘dirty’ is neither accurate nor helpful. We recoil at the thought of someone comparing a woman who has had many sexual partners to a dirty stick of gum. We are appalled by this, yet somehow we’re supposed to be ok with describing food – another one of life’s great pleasures – in similarly loaded terms? I think not.

The ‘clean eating’ movement used these tactics to fuel the elitism that is rampant in the whole Wellness industry. Wellness puts a price tag on health by making health something only a few people can afford, by making expensive powders seem more desirable, by selling you lies about how if you only eat this way you’ll be healthier and superior to others.

While the rules of clean eating can vary from person to person, the underlying commonality is the omission of certain food groups – whether it’s gluten, dairy, grains or meat. These are the ‘dirty’ foods, although they’re usually called ‘forbidden’ foods, whereas foods to include are happily called ‘clean’.

‘Clean eating’ is often associated with thin white women posing on the covers of bestselling books with a plate of vegetables. But the morality of clean eating isn’t limited to one gender, although it is marketed differently to men. Rather than the focus being on purity in a feminine sense, instead it is centred on producing a masculine muscular body that is strong and capable. It involves a lifestyle that rejects ‘dirty’ foods that would pollute or slow down the body and its progress, both in terms of aesthetics (or muscularity) and life ambition/success.64

The idea of ‘unclean’ foods is physically repulsive to us. If someone served you food on a dirty plate or served you a glass of wine with a lipstick print on it, you’d likely refuse, as the food had been contaminated by the used crockery and was therefore ‘impure’ and ‘unclean’. We feel disgust (a powerful emotion) and that disgust is passed from the plate to the food to the person who eats it. We see this with ‘clean eating’ as well: people are grossed out by those who eat meat, who eat ready meals, or who eat whatever foods they have deemed to be ‘unclean’. The difference, though, is that while the ice cream you dropped in the mud is definitely dirty, the ice cream you’ve spooned from a mass-produced tub definitely isn’t.

By following a ‘clean’ diet you are therefore proclaiming to the world that you value yourself more highly than someone else, that you take care of yourself better, and that makes you a better person. It’s not enough to keep your house clean and maintain personal hygiene; you now also have to be squeaky clean on the inside.

The ‘clean eating’ movement was very much shot down back in around 2016, and all the wellness bloggers who once used the term have distanced themselves from it, claiming they intended it to mean ‘healthy’ and they don’t like what it’s become. In doing so, they not only completely failed to acknowledge that they were the ones who turned the phrase into what it represents, but they also failed to understand the very issue with the word ‘clean’ – it implies that one person’s way of eating makes them morally superior and a better person than another.

Sadly, the phrase, despite being abandoned by those who helped it rise to fame, is still widely used. That needs to stop.

Real food

What is real food? I’ve yet to come across someone who can define this and who then goes on to actually follow that definition. Most follow the argument of eating only ‘whole foods’ and nothing processed or anything you can’t pronounce. But these same people are usually more than happy to consume protein powders, which are definitely very processed.

Real food doesn’t exist. What’s the opposite of real food? Fake food – not edible; imaginary food – also not edible. Therefore, surely anything edible is ‘real’ food? I can hold it in my hands so it must be real. But of course, it’s not that simple: ‘fake’ food is argued to be anything that isn’t ‘natural’ – a word that’s even more difficult to define.

‘Real’ and ‘natural’ are often used interchangeably when it comes to food, and what is ‘real’ varies according to the dietary dogma of choice. On many low-carbohydrate diets, ‘real food’ is generally real fat, and low-fat products are deemed fake and flavourless. Full-fat ice cream is deemed the ‘real deal’, whereas low-fat ice cream is an ‘imitation’. There is a sense that something about the ice cream has been destroyed by removing fat, despite the fact that this is not how low-fat ice cream is made. It implies that food manufacturers start with ordinary ice cream and literally remove the fat from it to distort it into something else. Instead, what actually happens is that they start with different ingredients, such as low-fat dairy products instead of full-fat, and then add additional emulsifiers or other ingredients to improve the texture and ‘mouthfeel’ to resemble the full-fat version as much as possible. But that truth is pushed aside in favour of the narrative of ‘naturalness’ and ‘wholeness’ or inherent integrity that is so important to low-carbohydrate diet discourse.

This idea of ‘real food’ being ‘whole food’ also appears in the wellness world, where whole foods are prized above all others, suggesting that other foods are not complete in some way and are (at most) only partially food.

If we then extend this to ‘You are what you eat’, no one wants to be called fake, whether it’s being a ‘fake’ friend, having a ‘fake’ designer bag, or being told ‘fake news’. It suggests dishonesty, disloyalty, or a malicious intent. ‘Real women have curves’… But how can you be a fake woman? Apply this to food and it implies the food has some insidious quality that wants to cause you harm, whereas ‘real food’ is associated with honesty and pure intentions.

If you want someone to avoid eating something, call it the opposite of ‘real food’, such as a food-like substance, stuff, product – anything but actual food. We see this in almost every dietary regime under the sun: in low-carbohydrate books, refined carbohydrates are referred to as ‘packaged refined carbohydrate stuff’; in the wellness world anything off limits is referred to as ‘nasties’ or ‘empty calories’ (see below for more on that one); and in the vegan communities eggs are referred to as ‘chicken periods’ while meat is ‘flesh’ to deliberately invoke disgust.

Detox/cleanse

First things first: you have a liver and kidneys, which work hard 24/7 to perform the normal detoxification processes necessary to keep you healthy and alive. No food, no supplement, no special tea can detox your body. You can support your liver by eating a generally well-balanced diet and not binge-drinking, but apart from that the food you eat simply will not detox you.

‘Detox’ has entered our conversation all too casually, mainly in relation to alcohol. It’s also used to mean ‘trying to be healthier’ or ‘trying to lose weight’. ‘New year detox’. The popularity of detoxes has come about partly because of a false narrative that modern life is toxic and we have to take additional steps to de-toxify ourselves from all the toxins floating around. We have to purify ourselves, or ‘cleanse’ our bodies for them to be in their optimum state. This links nicely back to ‘eat clean’ and is partly why the clean-eating movement is rife with ‘detoxing’ meals, juices and even juice cleanses. Superfood powders are supposed to help ‘detox’ you, a ‘detox’ bowl will supposedly leave you feeling light and fresh rather than sluggish, and juice cleanses allegedly ‘reset’ your digestion, as if your organs, when malfunctioning, just need to be switched off and back on again like a computer.

It’s been suggested that this need to punish ourselves to be healthy, to detox and cleanse ourselves, comes from the fact that many religions practise fasting and purification. And just like holy water purifies you and washes away your sins, so a juice cleanse washes away those pesky toxins that are making you feel run-down, leaving you a purer, better person than you were before (not).

It’s fascinating how we use physical cleansing as a coping mechanism and ‘cure’ for moral impurities. A threat to our moral purity induces the need to cleanse ourselves. In one interesting study, people were asked to recall either an ethical or unethical action from their past. Those who spoke about something unethical they had done were more likely to choose an antiseptic wipe afterwards to wipe their hands with (thereby ‘cleansing’ themselves) over choosing a pencil (the control item in the study – asking participants to choose between a wipe or nothing wouldn’t be a good study design).65 We can apply that to other behaviours, such as going out drinking at the weekend and maybe saying some things you regret, and feeling the need to go on a juice cleanse on the Monday to wash those negative feelings away.

While this is a possible explanation, many would disagree and think it’s simply the dieting industry co-opting religious language to invoke familiarity with a concept, thereby making it more appealing. Because so many of us in our childhood (or adulthood) went to religious services where talk of cleansing was part of the package deal, we see it as familiar and are more drawn to it, and so more likely to buy the products.

So, thinking of a cleanse to atone for last month’s dietary sins? Maybe think again.

Cheat meal

Picture the scenario. You’ve just started on a ‘healthy eating’ programme, you follow it solidly for 12 weeks, being ‘good’, being ‘disciplined’. Then the 12 weeks are up and you decide you’ve been so ‘good’ you deserve a night off. So you have a ‘cheat meal’ that’s definitely not on-plan, and definitely contains forbidden foods. One of two things likely happens: either the ‘cheat meal’ turns into a ‘cheat day’ and a ‘cheat weekend’ and so on, or you overeat, feel guilty and decide to go back to the plan, effectively starting a binge-restrict cycle.

Unsurprisingly, there hasn’t been much actual research on ‘cheat meals’, although one analysis of social media images tagged with #cheatmeal found that a significant number of images showing cheat meals were large enough to be classified as an objective binge.66 Not even a subjective binge (i.e. a larger-than-usual quantity of food), but an amount of food that would be classified as a binge by the American Psychological Association. That, to me, is very worrying, as it is normalising disordered eating behaviours. The accompanying captions further normalise this, and explicitly refer to compensating for the meal later in the form of exercise, or the meal being a reward for being ‘disciplined’ for a considerable time before (more on that below). In addition, the foods chosen for a ‘cheat meal’ tend to be very energy-dense foods like pizza or ice cream, just as is common in an objective binge.

To ‘cheat’ is to break a rule or ‘act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage’. What rule are you breaking when you have a cheat meal? It’s either one you made up or one given to you by a plan of some sort. In which case it’s a diet, and by now I think we’ve established that diets are not the answer. But even if you don’t perceive yourself to be on a diet, this is still the dieting mindset. It’s a ridiculously hard mindset to break out of, especially if you’ve been in the dieting space for a long time. Also, what are you cheating on? If you’re not on a diet, then you can’t be cheating, because you’re not breaking any rules, so it’s the wrong word to use. By having a ‘cheat meal’ you’re also not acting dishonestly or unfairly.

You’re not doing anything bad by eating a pizza or a piece of cake. One single meal is not going to undo all the nutritional benefits of eating plenty of fruits and vegetables over the months/years. There’s no such thing as a perfect diet, so eating foods you enjoy is simply a part of life. In fact, I would argue it should be encouraged! Eating for pleasure is so important for your health long term, and avoids the mentality of restriction or deprivation that sets you up for a binge-restrict cycle.

Some people also fall into the trap of scheduling a ‘cheat meal’ and then looking forward to it all week. This builds up the food to be something special and puts it on a pedestal. It makes it desirable to the point where exposure to that food is likely to send you into overdrive, where you feel you have to eat as much of it as you possibly can because this is your one chance to have it. But in reality, there’s nothing that special about this food, and raising it so high above other foods simply makes it much more desirable: we always want what we tell ourselves we’re not allowed to have. Take the food off a pedestal and it loses its power. It goes from being a ‘cheat meal’ to a particularly delicious and enjoyable meal.

Finally, if you call it a ‘cheat meal’, it’ll likely take away from the enjoyment of eating it. Invoking the idea of cheating is automatically a negative association that implies you should feel guilty. And guilty is not how we want to feel after eating. Which leads me nicely on to the next term…

Guilt-free

Often, I hear the phrase ‘guilt-free’ being used to describe foods that are ‘healthy alternatives’. Foods such as sweet potato brownies instead of ordinary ones, or cauliflower crust pizza instead of Domino’s. These are recipes that are ‘healthier’ versions of so-called ‘guilty pleasures’ such as pizza, ice cream, chicken wings or cake.

What this is really saying is that the ‘ordinary’ version of these foods should make us feel guilty. If you buy a brownie that advertises itself as being ‘guilt-free’, does that mean the one next to it is full of guilt, and should therefore make you feel guilty? I think that’s a horrible and sad way to look at food. It doesn’t make us feel better; it just turns what should simply be enjoying a food you might have occasionally, but not every day, into a negative experience drenched with self-criticism.

Not only does that make us feel mentally miserable, it also increases the stress hormone cortisol, which makes you feel physically crap on top of that and potentially makes those cravings worse.

If you choose to eat a food that’s maybe less nutrient-dense, or not traditionally seen as ‘healthy’, then you should be free to simply enjoy that food, and make that a deliberate choice for your own happiness. Feeling happy after eating something is not a crime. You don’t need to do penance afterwards and compensate by eating only leaves for the rest of the day.

The term ‘guilt-free’ isn’t just limited to food, of course. We now have guilt-free TV, shopping, desserts, drinks… Even the term ‘guilty pleasure’ is often used to describe our taste in music or television. It’s a method of self-protection, as it pre-emptively shows disdain for our own choices before others can make fun of us. If we are unapologetic about enjoying something, we can be laughed at for it, and it can hurt us. Calling something a ‘guilty pleasure’ is self-deprecating and tells us we aren’t allowed to do what we want because it’s not right, normal or ‘cool’, or we haven’t earned it.

Some might argue that guilt is a useful motivator to change behaviour and can aid self-control, but the research shows this isn’t the case. In one study, people were asked if they associated chocolate cake more with guilt or celebration. The people who associated chocolate cake with guilt were not healthier or more motivated than those who associated it with celebration. In fact, they felt less in control around food and said they were more likely to overeat.67 Guilt isn’t helpful or a motivator. It leads to feelings of helplessness and lack of control, as well as self-criticism, all of which can encourage poor self-esteem and low mood.

In essence, no food should ever make you feel guilty.

All food is guilt-free.

Empty calories

Empty calories are supposed to be foods that contain large amounts of macronutrients (usually both fat and sugar), which provide calories, with a notable absence of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) – so, energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods like doughnuts, soft drinks and alcohol.

The main problem with this is that we need calories to survive. Calories are the energy our bodies run on. We live in a food environment with more abundance than ever before, which naturally causes us to question and rebel against that which we have too much of (calories). But we can’t just eat vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients to survive – we need calories.

Obviously I’m not saying go and eat as many of these foods as you want. But choosing foods purely based on how nutrient-dense they are completely ignores all the other aspects of eating, such as the social and cultural aspects, and the enjoyment of food. You don’t have to avoid all ‘empty calories’ in order to be healthy, and only eat the most nutrient-dense foods you can find. Eating too many of these nutrient-poor foods (just like eating too much of anything) isn’t recommended, but even calling them ‘empty calories’ reduces the enjoyment of them and encourages feelings of guilt and shame. As we’ve already established, these aren’t helpful feelings when it comes to food. Enjoying these foods in moderation alongside plenty of fruits and vegetables is perfectly fine.

There’s a notion that calories should always come with nutrients attached. ‘Should’ is a highly loaded and misleading word here. When we suggest that food should be a certain way, it implies that foods that aren’t that way are somehow wrong, and therefore shouldn’t be eaten. When we then crave these foods but believe they’re wrong and bad, we try to turn to more nutrient-dense options that (at least in the vast majority of cases) just don’t satisfy that craving.

In certain scenarios, these kinds of foods are exactly what someone needs. For example, someone undergoing chemotherapy may experience side effects such as nausea and vomiting. Weight loss during this process increases risk of mortality, so if all someone can stomach is pastries and sugary drinks, then that’s what they should eat!

Calories are energy. Energy cannot be empty. Therefore calories are whole.

Good/healthy, bad/unhealthy

As humans, we love binary black-and-white thinking. So we like the idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods. We like dividing food up into these two neat categories. But food isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it’s just … food.

The notion here is that eating ‘good’ foods should be encouraged, whereas eating ‘bad’ foods should be avoided. But the only food that is ‘bad’ for you is one that you’re allergic to, or one that’s gone off and mouldy. Any other food is inherently neutral. A food cannot be morally good or bad, regardless of the effects it may have on your health.

If you eat ‘good’ foods you don’t become a good person, and when you eat ‘bad’ foods you don’t become a bad person, but when we use this language that’s what we’re implying. ‘I’m being GOOD today – I haven’t eaten any chocolate’, ‘I really shouldn’t eat this – I’m being so BAD’. No. The food you eat does not change your value as a human being, nor does it make you a better person than the one sitting next to you.

I don’t use the word ‘healthy’ to describe food. There is really no such thing as a food that is intrinsically healthy, nor is there a food that is intrinsically unhealthy. Everything in nutrition is context-dependent and what may be healthy to one person is unhealthy to the next. Beans are celebrated in a vegan diet but shunned in the paleo community. A single food cannot impart health to an individual. It takes more than one food to be healthy, and it takes more than one food to be unhealthy. I believe you can have an overall healthy or unhealthy diet, but not healthy or unhealthy foods. Foods exist on a scale of nutrient density, and the order dramatically changes depending on what nutrient you are after. If you’re calcium-deficient, then having some milk or leafy greens is arguably healthier than eating a carrot. If you’re after omega-3, then oily fish is far healthier than eating a tomato.

‘Healthy’ is also often used to mean ‘low-calorie’, as if the two are somehow the same thing. Most of the arguments revolving around this say something along the lines of ‘A food can be low-calorie but still full of artificial flavourings and nasty ingredients’, which also isn’t helpful at all – it’s substituting one problematic language use for another. The equating of the two is linked to the idea that eating fewer calories is always better and weight loss is always the goal because thin equals healthy. By now it should be very clear that’s not definitely the case. Multiple studies have also shown that when food items are labelled ‘low-calorie’ or ‘low-fat’ it adds a ‘health halo’ to these items, which means people are more likely to overeat on them. I’d much rather people enjoy the exact food they want – not necessarily the lowest calorie version – and savour it without guilt.

I agree with using the term ‘healthy’ to describe an overall pattern of eating, but that property of healthfulness is not due to a single food, it’s due to the overall picture, and that can easily include some less nutrient-dense and delicious foods like cake and chocolate.

Everything in nutrition is context-dependent, so based on that alone no food can be inherently healthy for everyone in every possible situation, nor can a food be inherently bad for everyone in every possible scenario. Even making assumptions and generalisations isn’t ideal, as the very act of calling a food ‘good’ or ‘bad’ attaches moral values to it that don’t belong there. Nutrition and food choice exist on a massive spectrum of grey shades and are almost never absolute.

Everyone has different nutritional needs and desires and preferences. A label of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is far too simple and doesn’t capture the complexity of our relationship with food.

Food can be nutritious, but not healthy. And all foods can be part of a healthy, balanced diet.

Junk food

There is no strict definition of junk food; the term used instead is High Fat, Sugar and Salt foods (HFSS). The legal definition is based on the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) nutrient profiling of foods to determine what should and shouldn’t feature in advertising to children.

The term ‘junk food’ is mainly used to describe cheap, mass-produced fast food. Anything artisan or ‘wellness’ is conveniently removed from this, even if the nutrient profile is essentially the same.

But what about ‘wellness’ brands? Your favourite energy balls, raw crackers and nut butters from health food shops are also mass-produced and made in factories. Yet because they’re expensive and ‘wellness’ we wouldn’t dream of calling these ‘junk food’. The same bloggers who preach home-made food and eating as close to ‘natural’ as possible now either sell their own (factory-made) products, or are happy to promote them on their social media channels. Now obviously I’m not saying there’s something wrong with eating these foods, but what really makes them different from non-wellness products other than marketing and cost? Is a burger by a wellness blogger automatically better or ‘healthier’ than one from McDonald’s simply because it’s more expensive?

Calling it ‘junk’ food is suggesting it’s useless and a waste. It’s a phrase that’s used to cast a moral judgement on certain people’s lives, and to signal our disapproval of that food, to label it as inferior. It’s a way of shaming people for their food choices; by saying they’re eating junk, the suggestion is they’re treating their body like a bin and are therefore worthless.

Earn your food

As a human being, if you don’t eat food, you will eventually die. Food is essential for survival. So why the hell should you have to earn something you need to survive? We are told that we need to ‘earn’ our food through exercise but never that we need to earn water, oxygen or anything else. Similarly, exercise is not punishment for having over-indulged. You can’t negate or ‘burn off’ what you ate.

It’s an interesting idea that people often believe – that behaviours or foods can cancel each other out in some way. But, of course, you can’t turn back time, so all you can do is add foods or add movement – you can’t take anything away.

Using food as a reward is something you were likely taught as a child, with parents probably saying something along the lines of ‘If you finish all your homework on time you can have ice cream.’ And while food can be a good motivator in some senses (it definitely encourages me to finish my work faster if I can feel myself getting hungry), motivation is very different from having to ‘earn’ food. Food should never be ‘currency’ that’s earned by punishment.

If you feel like you overate and overindulged, that doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself for having a good time. You can’t change it, it’s done, so the best thing you can do is simply move on. Do something positive and productive instead of battling with your body.

When you try to earn your food through restriction or doing exercise to burn calories, you are essentially saying you don’t deserve it unless you engage in these behaviours, and you are defining your value based on food. That is not a healthy way to view food.

So, repeat after me: I am a human being and I ALWAYS deserve food because I need it to survive.

Fat-burning

We use metaphors of fire and burning to describe the eating process. Fire is both destructive and useful. It can get out of control and become greedy, leading to devastation and ruin, and it can also be the daily ‘fuel’ that keeps the human body alive and moving.

This idea of burning foods has partly come about because of the parallel to combustion engines in cars and how they burn fuel, and because of the use of bomb calorimeters to determine the calories in food for nutrition packaging.

Technically the body does ‘burn’ fuel, whether it’s fat, carbohydrate, protein or alcohol. It converts the energy in the chemical bonds between the atoms in food into kinetic (movement) energy by breaking (metabolising) them. This process results in the formation of water and carbon dioxide.

The concept of ‘You are what you eat’ has led people to believe that fat outside the body must behave in the same way inside the body, which has translated into ‘fat burning’ and ‘fat melting’ food claims, and claims that you can literally melt fat and sweat it out. The fact is that the sweat is simply there to cool you down and has nothing to do with you metabolising fat. The carbon dioxide and water produced from fat metabolism are excreted by your body in the form of breathing and urine. Technically, you’re breathing out and peeing out fat, not sweating it out. And even that is an oversimplification.

Despite all this, there is no such thing as a ‘fat burning’ food. Green tea, chilli, pepper, even celery … all these have been touted as fat-burning. First, the idea that some foods require more energy for digestion than they give you is total nonsense. You use approximately 10 per cent of your energy intake for digestion, so that still leaves 90 per cent left over regardless. Foods give you energy – they don’t cause you to burn fat.

Second, while there is some evidence that shows your metabolism can be elevated slightly with the ingestion of certain foods, the effects on your metabolism are so brief and so minimal that they will not make any changes to your body composition, even in the long term. In comparison to moving your body – whether that’s going for a run, going to the gym or just walking – the effect of foods on your metabolism is so small it’s not even worth obsessing over.

Food metaphors are unavoidable, whether it’s talking about human value or sex or femininity. Metaphors are an essential part of our cognitive processes. But what we can do is use these metaphors in a positive way, remove any negative ones from our vocabulary, and be more mindful of the language we use to describe food.

All these words and phrases are interlinked and have one big common factor: they moralise food and define your worth as a person by what you eat. Talking more positively about food and avoiding attaching morality to food is a simple way to improve your mental health and self-image.

Healthy language, healthy mindset, healthy life

WORD / PHRASE TO BANISH	REPLACEMENT	CONTEXT?
‘Clean eating’	Balanced eating	‘I haven’t been eating well recently so I’m going to eat clean make sure my eating is more balanced from now on.’
‘Real’ food	Food	‘I only eat real food.’ ‘Well duh, what else is there?’
Detox/cleanse	Healthier habits	‘I drank so much alcohol last week I’m going on a detox to make sure I engage in healthier habits this week.’
Cheat meal	Indulgent meal	‘I’m having a cheat meal indulgent meal this weekend and I cannot wait.’
Guilt-free	Delicious	‘These brownies are totally guilt-free delicious.’
Empty calories	Less nutrient-dense food	‘White bread is just empty calories may be a less nutrient-dense food but I’m really enjoying it.’
Good/healthy	More nutritious	‘The salad may be the good more nutritious option on the menu.’
Bad/unhealthy	Less nutritious	‘But I feel like having pizza even though it’s bad less nutritious.’
Naughty	Listening to cravings	‘Oh God, I’m being so naughty listening to my cravings by eating this chocolate.’
Junk food	Less nutritious food. Or, just call the food what it is.	‘I’m craving junk food a burger tonight.’
‘Earn your food’	Fuelling your body	‘Time to hit the gym so I can earn my food then I’m going to fuel my body after.’
Fat-burning	Spicy/hot	(For this one, maybe just don’t say anything.)

Using words like ‘cheat’, ‘bad’ and ‘naughty’ creates negative associations with food that we don’t need. When we are in a place where we are feeling guilt or sadness at not being ‘good’ with our food choices, it takes away from the pleasure of eating and all the other wonderful aspects about food – whether it’s celebration or togetherness or culture or nostalgia. It also creates a strong, restrictive mindset around food, providing space for rules, seeking perfection, failure and shame. This mindset leads you to think that you’re eating something nutritious or ‘healthy’ because you feel you ‘should’ or you ‘have to’, which again takes away enjoyment, and also makes you want to ‘cheat’ even more. And so it creates a vicious cycle of ‘being good’, then ‘cheating’, then ‘being good’ again, and so on, which will only worsen as each cycle encourages further restriction and rules to try to prevent it happening again. Freeing yourself of these negative associations with food frees you from the cycle of rules and restrictions and stress and guilt, which is a much happier place to be.