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When people say, “that food is my weakness.”

Welcome to another edition of, “phrases that annoy me!”

I dislike when people say, “that food is my weakness,” because it just doesn’t make any sense to me.

How can you call a biological need a weakness?

If you breathe an adequate amount of air, you don’t have to gasp for air.  If you eat an adequate amount of ALL foods, you don’t end up ‘gasping’/overeating/feeling crazy around particular foods.  If you don’t rule out any food, then you (eventually) don’t feel insane around it.  It’s also good to remember that all food serves a purpose and sometimes that purpose is pleasure.  Being able to eat food because it sounds good and not because you are hungry is a component of having a healthy (non-neurotic) relationship with food.

Another example…

If you have to pee but don’t get up and go pee, all you think about is peeing! If you have a food you are craving and don’t eat it, all you will think about is that food.  So just like you should go pee when you have to pee, you should eat food you are craving when you are craving it (always worth checking in on emotional vs. physical hunger and YOU deciding what is the best way to care for yourself in that moment – sometimes eating a cupcake because you had an emotional day just works.  There’s nothing wrong with that happening as long as you’re aware of when it’s happening and have alternative coping mechanisms for stress/emotions/discomfort in place as well).

It’s good to remember that cravings are like itches.  When you have an itch you scratch it, just enough, to make the itch stop itching.  When you have a craving you should eat the food you are craving, just enough, to satisfy the craving.

So back to the title of this post…I just don’t get how any food can be a weakness, since any food you name is a protein, carb and/or a fat and you need all 3 of those macronutrients to sustain life.  If a food is a weakness, then you better start saying that breathing air is a weakness.

I realize some of you may be fearful of adding in ALL foods due to nutrition myths that have made you feel insane about feeding your body, fear that your body can’t digest certain foods, fear that your body is going to change size, etc….

But if you want to stop feeling insane around food.  You’re going to have to feel uncomfortable for awhile.  Uncomfortable/anxious with adding a wider variety of foods in, adding foods in regularly that you’ve binged on, etc.  It will probably feel wrong to eat all foods if you are coming from a school of thought that says certain foods are good/bad.  You’ll be uncomfortable…but you won’t be unsafe.  There’s comfortable, uncomfortable, and unsafe.  Instead of running away from the uncomfortable feeling, you’ve gotta be okay with it being there and you feeling it.  With my clients, recovery from disordered eating is purposefully structured to make them feel uncomfortable.  If you’re not uncomfortable in the early stages of getting away from disordered eating/exercise, you may need to make a change.  Eventually the uncomfortableness is replaced with connection to your healthy self’s intuition and with that comes feelings of ease and relief.

I want you to discover what it feels like to not have disordered eating or disordered exercise.  And that’s why I write this blog. 

If any thoughts, happiness, questions, resistance, etc. arose in you while you were reading this post, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section :)

30 comments

  1. Agree with this so much (as always!) The other similar phrase that irritates me is “guilty pleasure.” If people could learn to embrace delicious food instead of fearing it in some warped biblical way, we could all recover and learn to love ourselves and our food so much faster!

  2. Oh my lord, Kylie, you really are one of my favorite humans (or bloggers, at least ;) ). This is all so effing true! I hate when people say a food is their weakness, or they’re “so bad” for eating something. 

  3. You know what’s so tricky is those disordered thoughts just pop up and come out of nowhere sometimes (well I’m sure they are coming from a place of me using it to cope rather than deal with what’s at hand…)! But anyway, I was cooking a quesadilla last night and my ED thoughts said to use one tortilla and then the calories started making their way into my thoughts. SO ANNOYING! So I said F it, I knew I was hungry and that the quesadilla would be more satisfying and enjoyable with 2 tortillas. SO I did and I am fine and happy and life goes on. Reading your blog just is such a reminder to me that there is WAY more to life than worrying about eating 2 tortillas, I mean really! :) 

  4. Kylie – I am so grateful for your authenticity & how you never shy away from hard or uncomfortable topics. You are SO right about recovery feeling uncomfortable in the beginning stages. It feels so wrong to eat foods that your disordered eating brain has made you restrict/avoid for so long. But the breakthroughs happen during the uncomfortable moments. I don’t think true recovery is possible until you are ready & willing to be uncomfortable.

  5. Yes!!! I LOVE the itch, breathing, peeing analogies. Like, if you said, okay today I will only pee 3x..people would stare at you like you were nuts!! Yet, doing that with food is so normal i.e. I will only eat x amount of calories today. You can’t know how many times you will need to pee one day. You can’t know how many cals (how much energy) you will need on any given day. But, I also know how hard it is to make peace with food, and I love the statement that you will be anxious/uncomfortable at first. And the unsafe v. uncomfortable v. comfortable..I heard that on Food Psych too..maybe it was your episode?! Long comment..but I just love your thoughts :)

  6. This is SUCH. A grwat top

  7. This is SUCH a great post! In a world of dieting & good vs. bad food, this is profound. I’m sharing on my Facebook page in the hopes of helping people find your blog & the help they may need.

  8. I just love you. That is all. <3

  9. I’m the assistant manager of a pastry department and I get this ALL DAY LONG!! It’s so frustrating to watch people gaze longingly at our pastry case and say “oh, I just lost a ton of weight I can’t bring that home”, or “This stuff is all so bad for you so I’m just going to look, but not touch.” As someone who is in recovery and diving head first into the HAES and intuitive eating rabbit hole it’s so disheartening. Thank you for creating a place I can come to to remind of what recovery will bring me: A bigger life!

  10. I can’t express how much your blog has helped me discover what it is to not have an eating disorder. It has provided the support, the words, the information and courage I needed to finally work on my problems. Whenever something happens like I panic about gaining weight or I just need a nice self-love quote to repeat to myself, I turn to your blog and there is always something there to help me through (seriously sometimes it’s weird, like you know exactly what I am thinking/need that day). So before I ramble too much.. a big thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

  11. This was SO what I needed to read today! THANK YOU! 
    I was at a restaurant last week and one of the headings for entrees was “Sinfully Good…” ugh! Like, why?! Why can’t it just taste really good and not have that negative connotation that you just might be going to hell if you eat it?! Hate that! 
    BUT I was happy that I noticed it and called it out for being definitely diet culture and food shaming, instead of letting it get to me. 

  12. I really like this post. It encouraged me to get up just now and eat a brownie after dinner! Cravings are not scary, they are important signs from our bodies (and brains) telling us what will fulfill and satisfy us. ?

  13. Thank you so much for this post Kylie, you always have the right words! Loved the part about having to be ok with being uncomfortable, definitely needed to read that! Bookmarking this post now!!!

  14. Hi! This doesnt exactly pertain to this post, but hopefully you don’t mind answering haha. Do you have any tips on how to give up calorie counting? A few years back developed an eating disorder and I have since recovered for the most part, but there are still pieces that I struggle with and counting calories is definitely one of them, possibly the biggest. i want to let go of it and learn to eat intuitively, but I keep going back to counting calories. It’s just such a hard habit to break for me! I would love to hear if you have any advice:)

  15. Great points, Kylie! My pet peeve is when people say they have a food addiction. It really just ties back to the point of not restricting foods so you don’t have to be obsessed/feel crazy about it. Keep up the awesome work you do.

    • Agreed! I’ve sat in on a lot of talks about how food addiction/sugar addiction can’t be a thing, due to how we digest food and food/sugar not crossing the blood-brain barrier like drugs/alcohol can.

  16. I personally hate, “eat it, you EARNED it!” I want to SCREAM NO I am NOT a DOG, I didn’t earn a treat and then I want to growl at them. LOL.

  17. Hi Kylie! I feel hesitant to bring this up, but it seems to be a reoccurring thought/issue for me, so if you have any insight it is greatly appreciated. I have gained a decent amount of weight within the last year, and I’m admittedly somewhat uncomfortable with my current body, as I’m not used to it. My initial reaction is to try and lose the weight, because a lot of my clothes don’t fit anymore and it’s super frustrating. But after discovering your blog and others like it, I’m trying to possibly accept the idea that maybe this is where my body is supposed to be right now. I guess this is my long-winded way of getting to my point…when I read posts about you having accepted your body and it’s current weight (maybe specifically pre-pregnancy), in my mind I view it as possibly easier for you, or someone your size to do, as your body is still accepted as small/thin/whatever in society. Mine is not. I am plus-sized (kinda hate that term for various reasons), and I’m not ashamed of that, but I have this strange, perhaps defensive, feeling when I see bloggers or RDs who are so much smaller than me, telling me I should just accept my size. Or fulfill a craving, as discussed in this post. As I feel that society judges people who are my size more when eating certain things than they do a thinner person, as I’m expected to be constantly in a stage of attempting to be “healthy” or lose weight because of my size. Does this make any sense or am I just rambling? haha I sincerely hope this does not come off as rude or as an attack at you personally, I just have been struggling with these feelings lately and figured voicing them would result in helping me, or others possibly feeling the same way, find solutions. <3

    • Hi T! Glad you brought this up!! A post on this is already in the works! I’m glad you commented!! Stay tuned next week :)

    • I am trying to find a way to say this. I struggle that my clothes no longer fit as well. I am smaller (I guess). However, the memory of what I ‘used to look like’ is the SAME as yours. We all have the before pictures. My family saw me be SOOOO strict and now totally don’t understand when I eat certain foods and don’t work all the calories off. I think you are struggling with comparasions. They aren’t fair. We all have different attributes. I hope you find this helpful cuz that is what my heart was trying to do for you.

    • i have the same problem…and I am a dietitian!  I’m a big girl (size 18 ) and feel totally judged about what I eat or when I encourage others to let go of diet mentality…feels like I can’t be really telling them not to diet because they won’t take me seriously…but…I feel like intuitively eat and have been at least a size 14-16 my entire adult life since high school. it’s a struggle that I don’t know how to win, either…and the non-diet RDs are all tiny.  Your post is exactly how I feel!

  18. Loved this post! Following you has definitley made me change my thoughts around eating for the better!

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  20. Having nearly recovered from disordered eating (as you know it’s a lifetime process), I also hate that phrase. But I use it sometimes with people to whom I don’t want to disclose my past eating disorder issues. For me, that phrase can be code for “I still have some binging issues with that food (so I don’t want to order/purchase it)”. In my disordered eating days, anything could be a binge food, but now there are a couple things I end up overeating (not a true binge, but I ignore my hunger/satiety signals w/ these foods).

    Love your posts and your insight. Thanks for posting this!

  21. You’ve opened my eyes, yet again! I definitely used to and sometimes still do catch myself saying that about foods and you have certainly convinced me that it truly doesn’t make sense.

    Thank youuuuu!

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