52. The Naughty Food Trap: Why Labeling Foods as Bad Leads to Cheating

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger dives into "The Naughty Food Trap: Why Labeling Foods as Bad Leads to Cheating." Explore the psychological impact of food labeling and how designating foods as "bad" can create cravings and unhealthy eating patterns. Learn how to shift your mindset from restriction to mindful eating, fostering a healthier relationship with food. Discover practical strategies to break free from the guilt cycle and embrace moderation. Tune in to understand how to make mindful choices that align with your weight loss goals, empowering you to enjoy all foods without the label!

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher.

Transcript

Welcome back to Weight Loss Made Simple! I’m your host, Dr. Stacy Heimburger. I want to talk about something that I think is kind of fascinating just in the way our brain works around food, and it’s the idea of foods being naughty, OK? And how when we label foods as bad or off-limits, that can make them seem sexy and how it can be kind of fun in a way to eat them, even though our best intentions tell us not to.

So this idea of labeling foods as bad creates a sense of excitement and forbiddenness, and that usually leads us to actually indulge in those very foods that we're trying to avoid. Society has been doing this for a while. Food is either good or bad. The diet industry spends probably gazillions of dollars creating these food lists of what’s OK and what’s not OK, what works for you, what doesn’t work for you—blood type diet, your diet by your astrological sign—all of these very restrictive, bad ideas.

I think I even had a client who had gone to some nontraditional person who read something about her or something, and they came up with that food list of allowed and not allowed. So this is kind of everywhere. If you’ve been labeling food as good or bad, it’s not a big deal; it’s been happening. But after today, I hope I’m going to maybe convince you to just change the way we view these things a little bit.

When we label food as forbidden, OK, forbidden all of a sudden can become a little tempting, right? We’ve all got that little bad girl inside of us who’s like, "What do you mean? I can’t have that? I’ll show you!" I think especially the women I coach—sort of high-achieving women—really don’t like people telling us what to do, right? So it’s almost tenfold. If you tell me I’m not allowed to have it, I want as much of it as I can get.

One of these external cues about food takes a lot of information into account when we are deciding if we want to eat it or not. But we’ve got all these naughty foods in our house that we’re not allowed to have—cookies, chips, candy, whatever it is. I know sometimes sugar can be like this too, especially because I’m a huge advocate of really limiting sugar. But I want to limit sugar so that you won’t feel hungry, right? I have reasons. I’m not saying it’s not allowed. I’m not saying it’s forbidden, because the forbidden naughty food almost creates this little emotional connection to the food that makes it a little sexy.

We start having these little attractive feelings towards food. We don’t have those feelings about foods we’re allowed to eat. I’m not having any sexy feelings about broccoli. But if you tell me my chocolate, my piece of chocolate, is naughty, now all of a sudden that dark chocolate is a little sexier, right? I want it a little bit more.

So I found this very interesting. This concept was brought up, and I really started thinking about it. I feel like this is one of the reasons I hear women all the time saying, "I have this plan, and I do so great throughout the day, and then at the end of the day, when I’m tired, it just kind of falls apart." Right? Because we’ve had a day where we’ve been a little bit "poo-poo" on, either by things we’re telling ourselves or stressful situations, whatever it may be. Our brain needs a little break, and then we’ve got all these naughty food names.

I know it’ll make you feel better, right? "I’m not allowed. I’m forbidden." Come see me. There is a psychology that happens when we label foods, especially good and bad. We’ve set ourselves up with labeling our food as bad; we’ve made it forbidden and naughty and maybe a little sexy. Right? Our brain now is like, "Yeah, you can’t tell me what to do!" And now we want those foods way more than we would have.

As we indulge in that food, we feel horribly guilty. I know we’ve talked about the shame spiral before, but just to reiterate: we eat this bad food, this forbidden food. We feel bad about ourselves because we’ve cheated. We feel guilty. We don’t like feeling this way. We don’t like feeling uncomfortable. We don’t like feeling bad, so we eat more.

We’ve already messed up so bad, and those "not allowed" foods are calling to us. However, someone else has made you categorize food, and then they become more alluring. When our brain doesn’t want to feel the way it does, and we haven’t learned any other way to cope, those foods call the loudest. We feel double guilt, right? Maybe we feel extra guilty because not only have we broken our plan, we’ve set our intention, we’ve broken that, we’ve eaten something we didn’t plan—a bag of chips. Guilty, and the naughty food is talking to us again.

So you can see that horrible cycle, and in the cycle, there’s so much negative self-talk. We start being negative about the food, that bad, bad food, but it ends up with us talking about ourselves: "Bad, bad us! Can’t control myself! The worst! Never stick to my diet!" Always sounds familiar. Naughty or bad.

We have to stop making food food. We have to watch what we say to ourselves, even if the sentences are not coming out of our mouths. Even if they’re just thoughts and their sentences in our brain, the words make a difference. The labeling of food makes a difference. The way we set our plan, the intention makes a difference, and then the way we talk to ourselves if we don’t follow that plan makes a huge difference.

Understand that all foods are allowed. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about trigger foods. I never said in that episode that it’s not allowed. I said we can tell ourselves, "Not for now." I’m taking a break from that. I’m going to break up with that sexy food for now. I’m not saying it’s bad; I just need some time away from it.

So we make a plan, and we need to ask ourselves: What foods am I putting on here because I think they’re allowed, but I don’t even really like them? And what foods am I leaving off because I think they’re bad or naughty and I want them on there? And we plan for the day and eating that makes sense for us where we are right now.

There’s no sense making a plan for Stacy that I hope to be ten years from now. I’m like eating fast food 33 times a day! A plan for right now. Try and think about foods in a way that makes sense for us.

Here are some suggestions: This food will slow me down. This food will make me tired. This food might make me feel more hungry later. This food is bad. This food is not allowed. This food makes me feel good. This food gives me energy. This food doesn’t make me feel bloated. This food makes me feel full. This food helps me build my muscles.

I’ve been very careful, and I’m not perfect, but I try and be very careful with this nomenclature around the kids. Diet mentality happens so early, and it can be traumatic and really cause disordered eating. So I want you to think about this. If you call food bad or not allowed, I want you to really think about almost what your instantaneous next feeling is. To me, really, it is like, "Oh, I’ll show you." Maybe that’s just the oppositional defiant person, but I think there are a lot more of us out there.

You tell me I can’t have it? Now, all right, we’ll see. I’m listening to the ancient Greeks right now for my book club. They talk about this in the setting of Pandora’s box, which was really a vase, whatever jar. Pandora was told there was nothing she wanted to see, and that three times that she would become obsessed with it. When we say we can’t have it, we want it more. When someone tells you not to look in the jar, all we want to do is look in the jar.

About the elephant: categorizing your food—try and reframe how they make you feel. Does this make me feel good? Does this give me energy? Does this help me build muscle? But does this make me slow? Does this make me tired after lunch? Does this give me an upset stomach? Whatever it is, find some naughty food.

When we do this work to sort of take away the over-desire by doing this exercise, if we still feel like we just can’t do moderation, we can say we’re just taking a break from it. It’s absolutely the black-and-white rules that get in our head and can kind of sabotage what we’re trying to do.

I think what we’re trying to do is just be more mindful in what we’re picking and get to a place where we’ve sorted out our nutrition, right? Our hunger signals, right? Our hunger hormones, right? So we can just eat when we’re hungry, just until we’ve had enough.

And those foods that really make us feel good are going to be a little bit different for everyone, which is why I never like to say, "This food, I don’t do that," because everyone’s a little bit different. And I’m not going to be there for the rest of your life telling you what to eat every night for dinner. We have to find out what works for us, what works for our family, what works for our schedule, gives us fuel, what makes us feel energized.

And a way to do that is to stop labeling food as good. Food labeling creates a cycle of rebellion and then guilt and then overeating again, and it’s negative. So part of establishing a relationship is to try and catch yourself with these food labels and try and just know it’s just food. It’s just food. OK? It’s not good or bad; it just is.

I hope this has been helpful. Please forward this to a friend if you think that they would benefit from it, and if you have time, I would love it if you could rate the podcast and maybe even leave me a review. All right, until next week. Bye!