Do you feel guilty when you eat?

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

Guilt feelings are one of the key psychological elements to understanding the problems of diet, and even if it does not go hand in hand with disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, you need to know manage them. We are going to sink our teeth into everything that has to do with our overweight and overeating ...

• Related article: "Low selfsteem? When you become your worst enemy "

Some historical facts related to food

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

Imagine that your ancestor of many generations ago has not eaten for several days, and that suddenly a bush full of raspberries appears in front of him. What a binge! There is no time to lose, lest someone from the rival tribe come, so... Until they are finished, not one remains! The body will then take care of storing the excess nutrients in the form of fat, since there may be no more raspberries in the remainder of the week. We could call this way of eating "quick, it's over".

Let's go back to current times as they do in television series, jumping in time... Today, we go to the supermarket and a multitude of foods are waiting for us, with their best packaging, waiting to be chosen, to go to the checkout and be eaten at home... although we live in the world of abundance, again the "fast, it's over" mode is activated, and without taking off our jacket we have already opened the chocolate bar.

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

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From poor food management to guilt, and vice versa

As we are not usually aware of all this that is in our biological heritage as a species, sometimes, 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 generally want to correct... You guessed it, eating more fatty, sweet or very salty products.

One of the most promising approaches to cutting this "fast, over" eating cycle to self-criticism is Compassion-Centered Therapy, specifically CFT-E (Compasion Focused Therapy for Eating Disorders) by Ken Goss, in which in addition to developing a whole job of doing Faced with difficulties related to food, a model structured in six steps is proposed to improve the relationship with food. If you want to start this approach, at Psikonet we are developing it with several patients, give us a call!