When you’re doing everything right and still struggle with food guilt

I never, ever feel guilty about eating. Like, never. Even on the very odd occasion that I overeat, my belly’s hurting a bit, my trousers feel too tight, and my head is spinning from too much sugar… I still don’t feel guilty about it. It wasn’t always this way, though.

I don’t really remember when I started feeling guilty about eating. It was too long ago - I was young. I was around 5 or 6, when, as soon as I got collected from the childminder’s on my mum’s way home from a long day in the office, I’d hear her whisper, “We’ll stop for an ice cream bar on the way home, but don’t tell Dad”. At the weekends, mum would arrive home from the supermarket with huge bags of food, and I’d grab the big, puffy bags of Doritos and she’d say, “Alright, just a few but put them away before Dad sees.” Then as I got older, I’d marvel at the shiny, rainbow reflective tick stickers Mum would get for ‘a good week’ at Weight Watchers. She’d stick them onto the front of her Weight Watchers handbook, and I’d peek at the contents inside. Her weight chart was the first page. A list of numbers in ball point blue and black ink. I’d feel hopeful for Mum that the numbers would go down and excited for her when they did. Thin was better.

One day at the childminders, I had an awful stomach ache. I couldn’t play with the other children and I laid on the floor a bedroom in tears that it hurt so much. The childminder told me it was because my trousers were too tight. I didn’t ask for an ice cream on the way home that day.

When I was 10, I was enticed by a list of foods and their calories in my Funfax. A height and weight chart let me plot and find out I was in the borderline overweight category, the orange zone, and I decided I could swap my high calorie foods for low calorie to see if I could move over to the normal category, the yellow zone, on that chart. It started working. I was losing weight. But every time I ate something higher calorie, I felt like I’d done something terribly wrong.

If I ate a packet of Walker’s Salt and Vinegar crisps instead of an apple, the guilt swirl in my stomach, creep up into my chest and I’d feel sorry for hours as I’d visualise running around a park, doing starjumps or putting on Elle McPherson’s The Body workout home video when I got home to make up for it. The guilt would go away, but as soon as I ate a jacket potato laden with butter, beans and mounds of grated cheese, or a slice of mum’s lasagne, it came back with a taunting voice that said, “You can’t have that again. Tomorrow it’s just plain salad with no dressing.”

The years of guilt and mental punishment went on until I couldn’t take it any more. Any time food passed my lips, I’d feel devastated about it going into my body and being stored there as fat. Food felt like poison. Any time I ate, I could feel the food tingling my thighs as I envisioned cellulite settling there. I decided to stop eating altogether, if I could help it. Thankfully, the behaviour didn’t last long and I got called in by Mum. I managed to start eating normally again, but the weight started coming on fast.

I found many more ways of dieting over the years. My most prized books were The Atkins Diet; Pig 2 Twig and The Zone. Typical 2000s low carb, or what’s now known as the Keto Diet - and I was an expert. A particularly low point was asking on a forum about the sugar content in The Pill because one of the ingredients was lactose.

After my second pregnancy, I decided to join Slimming World. It worked for a bit, and then as I would lose half a pound one week, gain a pound the next, lose another half, then nothing for weeks, I became frustrated. Food guilt wasn’t an issue as long as I’d stuck to the plan, which was becoming increasingly difficult as I got more and more bored with putting half a plate of dry, bitter, cold, scratchy lettuce on my plate with all my meals.

When I was asked to start eating ALL the foods with no guilt as I threw my Slimming World literature into the bin, I decided to go all in.

‘ALL IN’ for me meant eating not just a little piece of chocolate with lunch, but having the WHOLE EASTER EGG AS my lunch.

It meant throwing out all my old 'diet food with glee’. I remember feeling giddy at the prospect of never having to eat quark again and filming the fridge contents as a reminder to myself that I never would waste money on diet food again.

All in meant giving myself temporary amnesia of everything I’d ever known about dieting, weight loss and good/bad foods. I was training my brain to think like a ‘naturally thin’ person, and to be that person, I had to think like someone who’d never dieted before.

As if by magic, I lost 4lbs in 2 weeks.