Do you feel guilty when you eat?

Many times, feelings of guilt are associated with poor food management.

Do you feel guilty when you eat? Or do you think about the calories in that food on your plate? Or do you visualize what you are eating at that moment in the form of a michelin?

Feelings of guilt are one of the key psychological elements in understanding eating problems, and even if it does not go hand in hand with disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, it is necessary to know how to manage them. We are going to sink our teeth into everything that has to do with our overweight and overeating...

Some historical facts related to food

It may be interesting, when it comes to looking at our relationship with food, to think that our body is the product of the evolution of living beings over millions of years, and that throughout most of this evolution food was not as available as it is today.and that throughout most of this evolution food was not as available as it is today. Think, if you think it can help you, how prehistoric man/woman would live and how harsh the external conditions would be in those contexts in which the first civilizations had not yet emerged....

Imagine that your ancestor of many generations ago has not eaten anything for several days, and suddenly a bush full of raspberries appears in front of him/her. What a binge! There is no time to lose, lest someone from the rival tribe comes along, so.... Until the raspberries are gone, let there be none left! The body will take care of storing the surplus nutrients in the form of fat, since there may not be any more raspberries for the rest of the week. We could call this way of eating "fast, fast, fast, fast, fast".fast, that runs out".

Let's go back to the present times as they do in the TV series, jumping in time... Nowadays, we go to the supermarket and a multitude of foods are waiting for us, with their best packaging, waiting to be chosen, to go through the checkout and be eaten at home... although we live in a world of abundance, once again the "hurry up, we're running out" mode is activated.and without taking off our jackets we have already opened the chocolate bar.

A couple of other facts that make things a little more difficult for us are on the one hand the preference of the human body for foods rich in sugars and fats (in the past they made us have more reserves, today they create massive health problems) and, on the other hand, that when the body has its reserves covered it tends to move less.

From food mismanagement to guilt, and vice versa.

As we are not usually aware of all this, which is in our Biological inheritance as a species, sometimes, as we gain weight, self-criticism, shame, even humiliation towards ourselves begins, as we gain weight, self-criticism, shame, even humiliating treatment of oneself begins.... And what does this usually create? Well, that state of discomfort that we usually want to correct ... you guessed it, eating more fatty products, or sweet or very salty.

One of the most promising approaches to break this cycle of eating in "fast, running out" mode to move into self-criticism is Compassion-Centered TherapySpecifically CFT-E (Compassion Focused Therapy for Eating Disorders) by Ken Goss, in which in addition to developing a whole work of coping with eating-related difficulties, a six-step structured model is proposed to improve the relationship with food. If you feel like implementing this approach, at Psikonet we are developing it with several patients, give us a call!