Making Peace With Food

Written by Michelle Shelton

November 18, 2022

Making peace with food was one of the most transformative steps of intuitive eating for me. My perfectionistic tendencies drove a lot of my eating patterns and my relationship with food. I remember reading magazine articles as a teenager that identified certain foods as “healthy”. Other foods were bad, or would cause bad things to happen to your body. I translated that into “you should only eat these foods” and “you should never eat these foods.” 


It sounds extreme, and it was! Yet we hear it and do it ourselves all the time, in one way or another. Maybe you only eat organic foods. Or you only eat raw foods. Or you don’t eat sugar. Or you don’t eat bread. Or pasta. Or maybe more common, you eat cookies and then say you shouldn’t have. Or you call it your guilty pleasure. Sometimes we put specific time boundaries around the restrictions, for example you go on a “cleanse”. You only drink juice for 3 days or only eat  “clean foods” for a month. Or you only eat certain foods on the weekends. Or you only allow yourself to eat meal replacement shakes and bars for all meals except dinner. The list could go on, but the bottom line is, these are all manifestations of an underlying belief that some foods are good and some are bad. 


Of course we know that all foods have different nutritional profiles. They each contribute different things to our health and to different degrees. As a dietitian, I love creating new and tasteful ways to prepare foods that I know will nourish my body. It’s ok to value nourishing and healthful foods. 


Making peace with food is about allowing all to be there. It’s removing the judgment from yourself and others for the foods you or they eat. It’s opening yourself up to enjoying foods that you love, but haven’t allowed yourself to eat, because it’s ok to simply enjoy foods. That is also nourishing! All of this has to be unconditional. Unconditional permission. Unconditional self acceptance as you eat a variety of foods.


The following are steps to making peace with food from the authors of Intuitive Eating, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, with a couple of my own added in. Before trying these steps, be sure you are consistently honoring your hunger. If you are over hungry, you’ll overeat, perpetuating beliefs that you can’t be trusted around the food when, in fact, you are simply hungry!