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In the United States, people have become more conscious of eating healthy to reduce the risk of obesity, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes. A possible negative side effect of those healthy behaviors is food guilt.
Food guilt refers to experiencing stress and guilt after eating certain foods, which can result in anxiety, shame, and unhealthy ways of eating.1 Read on to learn more about food guilt and get tips to help stop it and restore a more balanced relationship with food.
What Is Food Guilt?
When a person experiences food guilt, they have feelings of shame about what they’re eating. Food guilt can affect people by increasing negative emotions, especially if they consider the nutritional value of a food to be harmful to their health.
What Are Examples of Food Guilt?
Anecdotally, food guilt can come in various expressions. You might be experiencing food guilt if you:
Apologize about what you’re eating or how much you’re eating
Express food guilt by saying that you’re guilty about eating certain foods
Make negative statements about yourself—e.g., “I’m so gross”—during or after eating
Is It Normal To Feel Guilty After Eating Food?
Feeling guilty about eating food can happen sometimes, which is normal. However, consistently having food guilt is not.
How food guilt comes about can depend on what people consider the basis to be. “As a culture, we’ve fully bought into this myth that if we eat the ‘right’ foods in the ‘right’ amounts, we will achieve the ideal body shape,” Glenys Oyston, RDN, a Texas-based dietitian, told Health. “We’re sure it’s just a matter of trying hard enough.”
Another reason a person might feel food guilt is that eating any “wrong” food isn’t merely unhealthy. Some people may associate eating “wrong” food with a failure of willpower.4
Other Feelings You May Have
When you categorize foods as good or bad, you might classify yourself as virtuous or not virtuous, strong or weak, worthy or unworthy. However, an inability to resist forbidden foods isn’t a moral failing; it’s how people are wired.
“Our brains react really strongly to restriction,” Marci Evans, RDN, a dietitian in Cambridge, Mass., specializing in helping patients heal from eating disorders, told Health. “The more we say ‘No, bad’ about a food, the more we can’t stop thinking about it.”
Society’s catalog of “bad” foods has seemingly grown—gluten, red meat, anything in a package—until people have started apologizing for just eating. That thinking can happen even if your reasons for avoiding certain foods seem more concerned with health than weight.
For example, people might avoid dairy products because they experience digestive trouble but decide to eat them after completing a workout session. Oyston called that behavior “healthism,” stating that it’s just another manifestation of our diet mentality. In other words, feeling healthy depends on the activities or habits we associate with being thin.
Is Feeling Food Guilt an Eating Disorder?
Some evidence has suggested that shame leads to eating disorders like binge eating. It can also result in emotional eating rather than a healthy eating pattern.6
In some instances, obsessing about whether you should restrict your intake of certain foods can be an early sign of a more severe disordered eating pattern. Also, compulsively exercising because you feel you’ve eaten too much or too much of the wrong food is another sign.
“Even if it never gets bad enough to be clinically diagnosable, it’s still a problem when your thoughts about food take up so much mental space that other parts of your life begin to suffer,” Christy Harrison, RD, a dietitian and intuitive-eating counselor in New York, told Health. For example, that problem may occur when you think about an “off-limits” food so much that you miss the fun other people are having at a party.