chapter 4

Principle Four

Challenge the Food Police

The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

In this chapter, you will learn how to silence the instigator of the war with food, which are your thoughts that form the voice of what we call the food police. These thoughts and food rules do not just appear in your mind out of nowhere. They become internalized as a result of a variety of factors.

We are all born into this world innocent, filled with instinct and emotions and the capacity to eventually form thoughts. Even in the womb, the child learns about the world. Smells, voices, and sensations can be experienced, but the formulation of a belief system about the world begins once the child is influenced by the environment outside the womb. Beliefs about people, politics, religion, culture, education, and so forth, to which a child is exposed while growing up, are the building blocks of the child’s early formation of his or her own beliefs. In the realm of eating, this child lives in a nation—and, perhaps, a home—riddled with guilt about eating. Foods are often described in moralistic terms: decadent, sinful, tempting, or bad. This way of viewing food has become a false religion. Dieting has become the absolving ritual for removing the guilt of eating pleasurable foods.

The key defense for challenging the food police is to first develop nonjudgmental awareness of your thoughts and then cultivate retorts to the food police’s judgments and demands. Learning to speak up is essential to your self-esteem. The exercises in this chapter will provide ways to address and reframe those negative thoughts, so that the food police retreat and, ultimately, vanish.

Examine Your Beliefs

We have introjected the societal food police—the collective cultural voice—which becomes our inner food police. We know where to find it—it actually doesn’t have a very clever hiding place. It’s in the forefront of your mind and may sometimes feel as if it’s sitting on your shoulder, like Jiminy Cricket, whose favorite phrase was “let your conscience be your guide.”

You may have spent your life cowering before the voices from a critical parent, teacher, or spouse, only to have those voices internalized and made into your own. Consequently, your mind becomes clouded with self-doubt and negative thinking.

The solution is to examine your beliefs—their origin and impact on you—as these beliefs are the springboard for the thoughts of the food police. You will learn how these thoughts affect your feelings and, ultimately, behavior.

Evaluate Your Belief System About Food and Your Body

Review this list of prevalent distorted beliefs. Place a check by the statements that fall within your belief system.

List any other beliefs you have about food and your body:

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Examine the Origin of Your Beliefs

Beliefs are cultivated and influenced by many factors. For example, many people have a family history of living with a focus on weight and body size. A mother might comment on how her child looks and how the child’s clothing fits. A parent may use the scale daily and talk about dieting. A grandparent might make admonitions about how much food her grandchild is eating. There might be magazines in the home full of celebrity photographs that have been digitally altered to make their bodies look perfect.

Reflect upon the origin of your beliefs about your body or eating:

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Beliefs Affect Thoughts

Your thoughts are formulated from the set of beliefs you hold about how the world around you works. The thoughts and rules spoken by the food police are usually cognitive distortions—very strong statements that are based on false beliefs. If not challenged, these negative thoughts can affect many of your behaviors, especially your eating.

Examine Your Thoughts

Here are some examples of cognitive distortions. Read each one, and reflect on whether you’ve ever had a similar thought:

Have you had other exaggerated thoughts? Write down any that come to mind.

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Challenge Your Food Police Thoughts

There are two keys ways to work with food police thoughts. The first method, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), is the focus of this section.

CBT involves evaluating your thoughts and reframing them if they are faulty, which ultimately affects your behavior. The process begins with your observing your thoughts and questioning whether a thought is reasonable. Is there any scientific evidence to support your thought? Or does it sound unjustifiable, unreasonable, and faulty? Once you have identified an unreasonable or illogical thought, challenge it by replacing it with a logical thought.

Reflecting on your actual past experiences will help you evaluate whether your present thought has any truth or accuracy and whether it has actually resulted in any benefit to you. Here are some examples of a distorted thought, followed by a reframing of that thought, based on your past experience:

Unreasonable thought—a cognitive distortion:

I should never eat carbohydrates during the day, even if I crave them.

Unreasonable thought—a cognitive distortion:

It would be okay to eat fruits and vegetables—that’s good. But it’s bad to eat bread or pasta.

Your Turn: Practice Reframing Thoughts with Actual Experience

Describe a common distorted thought about your eating. Ask some questions related to this thought, reframe it with your actual experience, and reflect upon it:

Distorted thought:

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Questions to ask:

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Thought reframed based on your actual experience:

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Reflection:

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Make Statements Based on Facts

A second way you can challenge cognitive distortions or myths is by reframing them with facts. Here is an example:

Your Turn: Practice Reframing Your Distorted Thoughts with Facts

What are some faulty thoughts you carry? Reframe them with fact-based thoughts:

Distorted thought:

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Reframed statement based on facts:

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Distorted thought:

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Reframed statement based on facts:

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Approach Your Thoughts with Curious Awareness

The second way to work with food police thoughts is a simple process of just observing your thoughts, without allowing them to occupy your mind and without passing any judgment on them. Simply observe them. This is a form of mindfulness called curious awareness. Our minds habitually take hold of a thought and build a narrative or story around it, which can create unnecessary suffering. A robust body of research shows that using curious awareness, through mindfulness-based meditation, can be incredibly beneficial to your mental health (Grecucci et al. 2015). Simply observe your thoughts, without attaching to them or adding to the story line.

Your Turn: Practice Approaching Your Thoughts with Curious Awareness

Notice when you’re expanding your thoughts with a story you’ve created. Write an example of a root thought. Reflect on how adding a judgmental thought or a narrative story line makes you feel:

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When the same (or a similar) root thought arises, try to observe it without adding a narrative or judgment. There are many ways to practice doing this:

Pick one of these methods to practice and note how it feels:

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You have practiced ways in which you can challenge your food police thoughts, as well as the benefits of curious awareness. Depending on the individual situation at hand, one method may be more useful than another. By reframing your thoughts based on past eating experiences and by making statements based on facts, you can challenge an unreasonable thought. Additionally, you can reduce any suffering caused by a distorted thought by approaching it with neutral awareness, without attaching to it or creating a story around it.

How Thoughts Affect Feelings

Just as beliefs inform your thoughts, your thoughts can have a powerful impact on your feelings. Let’s say that you realize that you’re feeling anxious. If you explore the thought that preceded that feeling, it might be, I ate too much today. By evaluating and challenging that thought, the ensuing feeling is likely to be more neutral or even positive.

Pay Attention to Your Feelings

Here is a list of feelings that are often connected with eating and your body:

Refer back to the negative thoughts you noted in the Examine Your Thoughts exercise earlier in this chapter. Reflect on one of these thoughts and notice if it creates any of the above feelings.

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Reframe Your Negative, Judgmental Thoughts

The exercise below will help you recognize the impact of thoughts on your feelings. By reframing the thoughts, you can change your feelings.

First, describe how you feel after reading these negative statements:

Next, notice and describe how you feel when these negative thoughts are reframed into positive statements:

Now, reexamine your feelings. Compare and contrast your feelings, before and after expressing a positive statement:

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You have learned the powerful impact that challenging a negative thought can have on your overall well-being. The more you transform negative thoughts into positive thoughts, the less flooded you’ll be with negative feelings.

How Feelings Affect Behavior

You have experienced the impact that your belief system can have on your thoughts and how your thoughts can affect your feelings. Now, it’s time to understand how feelings (either positive or negative) can influence your behavior.

Reflect on Past Overeating Experiences

Reflect on a recent experience when you overate and ended up feeling uncomfortable. What did you eat, and where were you?

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Recollect what feelings you were having just before you began to overeat. Were they negative, positive, or indifferent?

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How did those feelings impact your overeating behavior?

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If you had negative feelings, they were likely triggered by negative thoughts, and those feelings might have impacted your behavior. Beliefs can initiate a cascade of negativity. Examining these beliefs can be your first step to changing the course of your actions in the future. Don’t forget: beliefs create thoughts, which affect feelings and then behavior. Practicing this exercise will empower you and give you a sense of agency in your ability to shift your eating behaviors into new ones that will be positive and enjoyable.

Spiral of Healing—The Way Out of Judgmental Self-Talk

Come From a Place of Curiosity, Not Judgment

Intuitive Eating involves a neutral, appreciative way of thinking. It’s filled with positive thoughts and gratitude. It’s based on the process of making change at one’s own pace. People who live with the diet mentality often have black-and-white thinking and see life in a linear way. They approach projects with the goal of going from A to Z in a straight line, rather than flowing with the ups and downs that come with any realistic goal in life. In the diet mentality, there is no room for deviation along the path. But life doesn’t work that way, and when the inevitable deviation occurs, the dieter’s rigid thinking leads to a sense of bewilderment and negative self-talk for not being able to stay on course. Negative beliefs and thinking impact your mental health.

Intuitive Eating gives you a more compassionate way of looking at your journey toward a healthy relationship with food. Imagine Intuitive Eating as a spiral of healing (see figure 4.1). The momentum is upward and onward, but it doesn’t flow in a straight line. It circles around the loops of the spiral as it moves upward. Those little loops represent moments of returning to past behaviors. These moments allow for reflection—time to examine beliefs and thoughts, self-care, and negative self-talk. All of these loops may have precipitated what some would label a setback, but which burgeoning Intuitive Eaters come to see as learning experiences. Make your motto “Come from a place of curiosity, not judgment!”

Figure 4.1. The Spiral of Healing. © 2017 Elyse Resch / New Harbinger Publications.

Transforming Negative Self-Talk into Positive Self-Talk and Gratitude

Consider the ways in which you engage in negative self-talk. For example, I’m worthless, because I don’t meet my exercise goals. Provide an example of your own:

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Create Positive Self-talk and Gratitude

Describe how you could change the negative self-talk you listed above into positive self-talk, using the concepts of the spiral of healing. Remember to come from a place of curiosity, not judgment. For the example above, you might say, I’m so proud of myself for bringing movement into my life. I’m not doing it consistently, but I’m working on it. I’m amazing!

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Expressing gratitude is another way of moving from negativity to positivity.

Make your own gratitude list. How does seeing the world through the lens of gratitude impact you and your life?

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Frame Your Goals and Behaviors with “For the Most Part” Thinking

The most common trap in which clients get stuck is perfectionistic thinking. This premise must be reframed in order to remove negative self-talk. Whenever you attempt to do something every day or always, your goal is perfection. Keep in mind Salvador Dali’s adage: “Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.” Here are some examples of perfectionistic thinking:

Realistically, how long do you think you will be able to keep up these types of commitments? And what happens when your child is eating a cookie and wants to share it with you, or when your partner says, “Let’s go out to lunch now,” but you’re barely hungry? The problem with these goals is that the moment you don’t reach your perfectionist standard, you feel as if you’ve blown it. You might even feel shame that you can’t be true to your word. With this disappointment in yourself and the accompanying shame, you’re likely to give up on your goal entirely.

One way of reframing your thinking is by adopting the phrase “for the most part.” When you set your goals, include a bit of flexibility: I’m going to exercise as often as it feels good, and when I’m too tired or don’t have time, I’ll rest. In other words, remember your commitment to consistent movement is going to be “for the most part.”

If you set out the intention that you’ll eat primarily when you’re hungry, acknowledge that there might be circumstances that warrant eating something even if you’re not quite there. For the most part, you’re eating for hunger, but you’re also going to decide to eat just for pleasure or convenience now and then.

Practicing the “For the Most Part” Frame of Mind

Reframe the following perfectionist goals into intentions of “for the most part.” Write a more reasonable intention, something that will have the likelihood of being successful. For example:

Now, you try making this shift for the following statements:

Create your own intention using “for the most part” thinking.

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Keep this pattern of thinking in mind in whatever you are doing. In fact, make a list of your “for the most part” intentions and post it where you’ll see it easily. It will eliminate perfectionist thinking—for the most part!

Food Rules

As a result of diet thinking, you may have created many food rules, which are based on old beliefs. They may have accumulated over your lifetime. Many people say that a powerful source of these beliefs and rules was their upbringing or the dynamics of their family when they were children. In this section, you will explore these food rules, which are spoken by the food police, and evaluate how these rules can affect you.

Examine Your Food Rules

No one starts out in life with “Ten Commandments of Eating,” engraved in stone, that must be obeyed. Belief systems and rules of eating evolve subtly. The questionnaire below will put you in touch with your food rules. Read the checklist, check yes or no, and fill in the blank spaces with any of your own food rules.

What Are Your Food Rules?

On the lines below, or in a separate notebook, write out the questions that you marked with a yes, and explore your answers, explaining how you fulfill that rule in your life. For the moment, don’t ask yourself why you do this or look into ways of eliminating or changing this rule.

Example: Question 3. Do you feel you have to eat perfectly to be a healthy eater? Yes. I eat perfectly by eating very few carbs and very low fat, and I eat no gluten.

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Challenge Your Food Rules

Review your answers, and see if you can reframe your food rules with answers that are flexible and not absolute. Notice when your thoughts have been rigid or perfectionist. For some questions, see if you can add “for the most part” to your answers. For example, I know that I can trust my body to give me the signals that will lead to balanced, healthy eating—for the most part. For others, you will find that the healthiest intention you can set is to challenge the food rule entirely. For example, you may have answered yes to Do you think that sweets should be avoided? In this case, reframing that rule with Intuitive Eating thinking would be, I’ve made peace with all foods, and I can eat sweets whenever I like—no foods need to be avoided.

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Your Family’s Food Rules

Your family’s beliefs have a powerful influence on forming your belief system. Even if their intentions are entirely positive, many parents raise their kids with rules about what’s okay and not okay to eat. It’s important to get a sense of these rules from your childhood, their degree of rigidity, and how they might still be affecting you. (Note: if you are a child or a teen, and thus are exploring the nutrition rules that you see around you, remember that your parents were likely well meaning when creating them.) As you read the checklist below in the questionnaire, take some time to reflect on each question before you answer yes or no.

What Were Your Family’s Rules and Expectations?

© 2017 Evelyn Tribole / New Harbinger Publications

Review Your Responses to Your Family’s Food Rules

On the lines below, or in a notebook, write down questions to which you answered yes, and describe how the rule was applied in your house and the consequences of these rules.

Example: Question 2. Were you expected to clean your plate? Yes, my parents wouldn’t let us kids leave the dinner table until we finished every bite. If we didn’t finish, we had to sit there—sometimes for hours—before we could go. Sometimes we’d try to feed some of our food to the dog or hide it in our napkins, but if we were found out, we were punished!

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Distinguish Your Own Beliefs from Your Family’s Rules

Look at each of your answers above, and for each answer, write down how you feel about these family rules and expectations. A possible statement reflecting your current thinking might look something like this: I finish eating when my body tells me I’m full. I would only continue eating until my plate was empty, if I were still hungry.

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Comments from Others

Have family members, friends, or acquaintances made comments about your weight, shape, or what or how much you’re eating? If the person making this comment acts like a critical parent, it is likely that you will feel like a rebellious child, and your behavior may reflect these feelings.

Reflect on the Impact of Comments from Others

A critical comment that could have a powerful effect might be something like: “That outfit is not very flattering on you” or “Do you really need that entire steak?” Would you feel an instinct to rebel against this comment? Rebellious energy, if not addressed, can create a backlash, which often takes the form of overeating. And would you also respond in other ways, feeling hurt, angry, resentful, or scared in response to the comment?

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How do you normally respond to a person who makes a comment like one of these?

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Although you can’t control others, you can speak up and assert that these types of statements hurt you or make you angry. Even if the person making the comment defends it by saying, “I’m only worried about your health,” the critical comment is hurtful and is crossing into your personal space. If you are not heard, and the person continues to be inappropriately critical or mean, you don’t have to stay and take it. In some instances, you’ll find that you can set boundaries, and the person might actually honor them. In either case, you can feel empowered by taking an assertive action, rather than acting out rebelliously.

Explore Comments You Have Received from Others

Write down a specific comment you have received from a parent, friend, partner, or someone else.

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How did you feel when you heard that comment?

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What action did you take? What did you say or do?

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Was there any other action you wish you had taken? If so, what would that be?

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Repeat the steps in this exercise as often as you need. As a result, you will strengthen your armor in reacting to inappropriate comments. You will learn how to speak up, set boundaries, and truly take care of yourself.

Change Your Critical and Rebellious Self-Talk

You often cannot control how others speak to you, even if you confront them about their criticism, but you can change how you speak to yourself. If you speak to yourself in a critical way, it is likely that you will respond with a rebellious voice, just as you would if someone else spoke to you in this way.

Think about how you tend to speak to yourself and how you respond to that self-talk. Imagine that you thought to yourself, You had a fattening hamburger for lunch, so you better not eat too much for dinner! How would that self-talk make you feel?

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Next, imagine that you responded to the above statement with the following retort: Oh, yeah, I’ll eat as much as I want for dinner—I might even eat another hamburger, and this time, I’ll have fries with it! Describe below how you feel when you imagine making that response. Do you feel like a rebellious child or teenager who is speaking in a defiant way?

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The following is a restatement of both inner voices. Pay attention to how you feel when you read it, and then, below, describe the feelings this statement invokes. I am satisfied from that wonderful hamburger that I had at lunch, and I’m not feeling hungry right now. Dinnertime is coming up soon, and at that point I’ll figure out what I feel like eating. If I’m hungry and feel like having a hamburger again, I just might do that. But I might just feel like eating a salad.

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Regularly practicing this kind of restatement takes away the power of critical self-talk. You will find that as you speak to yourself more gently, you reduce your rebellious retorts.

Now think about the impact of this next example of self-talk. Imagine that you make this statement to yourself about your appearance: You look so awful today. Your hair is stringy, your clothes aren’t ironed, and you look fat!

How did you feel as you read those words? Did you feel hurt, angry, resentful, or scared? What reaction would you normally have to that voice inside of you, which is speaking to you so critically? Might it be rebelliousness? If so, you are having an expected reaction.

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If you are using a critical voice toward yourself, practice replacing it with an objective, neutral voice. First, jot down a recurrent critical thought you have had about food, eating, or your body. Next, write how your neutral voice would replace that thought. For example, if you regularly tell yourself, You shouldn’t have eaten so much, a kinder thought might be, When I get distracted and eat more than my body needs, I feel uncomfortable. I’ll work on being more mindful in order to feel better.

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By noticing how you feel when you speak to yourself and when you respond to yourself or others, you will remove many of the barriers that have blocked you from connecting with the voice of your Intuitive Eater. It’s the voice of your autonomous Intuitive Eater—who knows the truth of your thoughts and feelings—that will lead you to a healthy relationship with food and your body.

Inner Food Voices

We carry within us a number of different voices that direct and sometimes interfere with our intuitive signals. In this book, we have already discussed the voice of the food police, but there are other voices as well, and some are positive voices that can help us make informed decisions about our eating. We call all of these voices the Inner Food Voices. They are divided into two groups, the Destructive Dieting Voices and the Powerful Ally Voices.

The Destructive Dieting Voices can bring you down in a moment. You can, however, take these negative voices and transform them into Powerful Ally Voices by using some of the exercises you have been practicing to challenge your distorted thoughts.

The Destructive Dieting Voices have a detrimental effect on your relationship with food and your body:

  • The Food Police decide whether you’re being bad or good in relation to your food choices. It combines your dieting rules with your food rules.
  • The Nutrition Informant aligns with the pervading cultural myths about which foods are healthy (not fattening) or unhealthy (fattening).
  • The Diet Rebel makes rebellious comments that leave you feeling powerless in your ability to make autonomous decisions about your eating.

The Powerful Ally Voices can aid and comfort you in your relationship with food and your body:

Become Familiar with the Inner Food Voices

Here is a quiz to practice identifying the different food voices. Which voice is speaking in each of the following statements?

  1. If you eat that piece of cheese, you’re going to get high cholesterol.
  2. I’m going to eat all of these cookies, even though I’m not hungry and they’re not really my favorite kind.
  3. I can trust my body to tell me what to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat.
  4. That food has a lot of garlic and onion in it, and I know that I get a stomachache every time I eat those foods.
  5. I noticed that I was overly full all day yesterday.
  6. Even though I ate past my fullness last night, it’s all going to be okay.
  7. I ate pizza last night, and I know I’ve gained five pounds from it!

Answer key: 1. Nutrition Informant, 2. Diet Rebel, 3. Intuitive Eater, 4. Nutrition Ally, 5. Food Anthropologist, 6. Nurturer, 7. Food Police.

Observe Your Own Food Voices

Describe two examples of your self-talk about eating from recent days. After each statement, identify whether it came from a destructive voice or an ally voice.

Self-talk:

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Destructive or ally voice? _______________

Self-talk:

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Destructive or ally voice? _______________

By focusing on finding the destructive and ally voices we carry around, it helps us recognize them immediately when they pop up unannounced. We can then learn to replace a destructive voice with an ally voice.

Replace the Destructive Dieting Voices with the Powerful Ally Voices

Identify two of your common destructive statements. How would your corresponding ally voice respond?

Destructive statement:

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Ally voice response:

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Destructive statement:

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Ally voice response:

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Practice making these responses every time you hear a destructive voice in your head. By doing this exercise regularly, you’ll find that the destructive voices appear less frequently, and, ultimately, you will hear only the ally voices.

Discover Your Innate Intuitive Eater Voice

You have just practiced reframing your destructive dieting voices by employing your powerful ally voices, which produce positive and encouraging self-talk. Ultimately, the goal is to uncover the voice of your innate Intuitive Eater and use it to guide you toward satisfying eating. Remember, you were born with all the wisdom you need to know how to eat. The voice of your Intuitive Eater will help you feel safe and confident about what to eat, how much to eat, and when to eat. For example, your Intuitive Eater will provide guiding and encouraging statements if you are planning to go out for a delicious dinner one night:

  • I’m going to a wonderful restaurant this evening, so I want to be sure to have an afternoon snack, so I won’t walk into the restaurant feeling ravenous.
  • When I get to the restaurant, I’ll take some time to thoroughly look through the menu to find something which I hope will satisfy my taste buds and my body.
  • When I feel comfortably full, I’ll take some time to reflect on how delicious the food was and how great I’ll feel if I stop eating at that point.
  • I can take my leftovers home and enjoy them tomorrow. Or if they don’t look good tomorrow, I can always just throw them out.
  • I might feel sad when I realize that my body has had enough to eat but that my tongue still wants more, but I know that this sadness will pass quickly and that I can eat whatever I want when I get hungry again.

Describe how your Intuitive Eater voice would respond in the following situations:

Situation: I know that I would like some dessert after my meal.

Intuitive Eater Voice Response:

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Situation: I’m not feeling well this morning. What should I do about my plan to exercise today?

Intuitive Eater Voice Response:

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Situation: I have a fancy gala this coming Saturday night. How should I approach what I eat that night?

Intuitive Eater Voice Response:

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Now, explore one of your real life situations:

Your Situation:

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Your Intuitive Eater Voice Response:

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Wrap-Up

Your war with food has been instigated by the voice of the food police. The exercises in this chapter are fundamental for learning how to challenge your negative thoughts, which, cumulatively, have formed the voice of your internal food police. By reframing these thoughts, you will finally silence the food police and make a lasting peace with food.

In the next chapter, you will see how the work you have done to reject the diet mentality, make peace with food, and challenge the food police will enable you to detect comfortable fullness, without the fear of future deprivation.