What is performative eating and how does it lead to disordered eating?

Performative eating is choosing food based on how it signals virtue, health consciousness, or discipline to others — not based on hunger, satisfaction, or genuine nutritional need. It becomes disordered eating because performing for others requires overriding your body’s internal signals. When you consistently deprioritize your own hunger and needs to manage other people’s perception of you, you disconnect from interoception — the foundation of a healthy relationship with food. Performative eating is especially common in women due to social conditioning that ties self-worth to external validation and the ability to meet cultural health standards.

Transcript 

[00:00:02] Stephanie: Welcome to It’s Beyond The Food Podcast, my sister. I’m your host Stephanie Dozi, and today. We’re gonna talk about something that I have been watching unfold around me in real time, and I’m gonna give you a specific example for a number of years, but it recently she’ll back up in my life and it’s called Performative Eating.

[00:00:22] We’re gonna talk about what it is, why it happened, and why it’s is a specific problem for women and what we can actually do about it. Whatever you are a health professional working with client who perhaps are displaying performative eating behavior, or you are a woman navigating your own relationship to food.

[00:00:46] So this episode is for any women in the world. Ready? Let’s get into it.

[00:00:52] Before we dive in, I wanna do a quick in my world, because I mentioned in the last episode about implementing some new behavior, both personally and into my business, and I wanna report back because it’s going beautifully. I am now on day nine of reading my favorite. Spiritual book almost every day, and even when I skip a day, I think it was last Saturday, that I skip, it’s no big deal because I do not have the fetish of consistency.

[00:01:26] And I am quoting that here because if you haven’t listened to Podcast 4 56, you may not realize that one of the biggest roadblock to building new behavior is the finish of consistency. And because I’m aware of it, I am not displaying it. So this behavior of reading this amazing spiritual book is going excellent.

[00:01:53] Okay, ready? I wanna skip right into performative eating. So let’s get into the topic of today.

[00:02:00] This episode stems from a particular incident that happened about five weeks ago. Some of you may know I’m a digital nomad, which means I continue to work and run my business and serve my client while traveling the world. And I mostly travel in, uh, with a company called Out Site, which is a co-living space, and the one that I was in in Mexico.

[00:02:28] In Kabul particularly is a house share living arrangement. By the way, it’s very popular with remote worker and it’s specifically designed for. Adult professional, and the people that tend to go to this place are privileged people that generally are financially stable, socially privileged, predominantly white people, and educated.

[00:02:58] Professional and the context matter. That’s why I am talking about it because we’re gonna get into Healthism. It’s very important to understand the social context and I’m specifically talking about this because we’re gonna talk about eating behavior and what makes. A non diet approach to how very unique is the intersectional envelope around our behavior.

[00:03:25] And that’s why I am bringing you the context of what I’m about to share with you here so you can comprehend why I am talking about this event in the way that I am talking about it. So. It is about the second week that I’m living into this house with four other people and I. Go down to the kitchen because in those facility we have rooms.

[00:03:57] Each individual has their own large room with their own private bathroom and shower. So we have a space that is private to each one of us. And then we have common spaces, which are like a living space. Like TV, couch and so forth, some coworking spaces and also a kitchen facility. And when I went down that morning, it was like six 30 in the morning, half awake.

[00:04:23] I opened the fridge door and I’m looking to find my milk in the fridge door. We each have our space. And then I noticed the lineup. Of different milk in the door. There’s five people in the house and there’s five different types of milk there. It was my old plain old cow milk in the door. I finally found it and then there was.

[00:04:54] Almond milk, and then there was another bottle of soy milk, and then there was another bottle of coconut milk, and then there was a bottle of oat milk, one type of milk for each people in the house. Because that morning I took a picture of it. It was so evident for me as a weight neutral nutritionist and, and intuitive eating expert to look at the door and to notice that to most people, it would just be.

[00:05:24] A number of different bottle of milk, but for me it was very evident. So I’m gonna post the picture of that in the show note. But as a nutritionist, as an intuitive eating certified counselor, as a behavior expert, I just stood there looking at the fridge in the shelf thinking this is a perfect picture of why I do what I do.

[00:05:44] Five people, five milk, five different performance. But here’s the thing, the people that. We are living with me. We’re not choosing their milk based on a diagnosed lactose intolerance because, just pause here. Once I noticed that the next few days I started to casually investigate ’cause I got curious. I’m like, are they, do we have, am I the only one in this house who’s lactose tolerant?

[00:06:16] So after my investigation and casual conversation, come to find out that nobody had been diagnosed, tested as lactose intolerant, they just thought that cow milk was not good for their health. Raise your hand if you heard that before. They just thought because of what they’re seeing on social media, what they’re seeing on the quote internet, that it wasn’t healthy to consume cow milk and it was healthier to consume non cow dairy, milk, milk.

[00:06:56] So they were choosing to consume non cow milk, not for me. Evidence that they’re not digesting it just because of what it’s signaled into the world. And it’s very common if you are a consumer of cafes, either because you go there to work or you consume cafe. This happens to me all the time.

[00:07:19] I go and get a latte and then the barista will look up and I don’t say oat milk or almond milk. I just say a latte. And then they’ll have this moment, they’ll look up at me and say, oat milk. I’m like, no milk. Cow milk, like just regular, plain on, and the vast, majority of barista are like taken aback because I’m into this hipster cafe where everybody chews anything but cow milk, and here I’m coming with cow milk.

[00:07:51] So people are making their choice around milk and around many other eating behavior based on the signal that the selection of a certain food. Emits into the world,

[00:08:04] When you go to a hipster cafe and you select a oat milk cafe, to many people, that signal that you’re more educated, that you’re more health conscious, that you are able to make better decision. And when you just eat plain old milk, you are not healthy. You’re not as well educated, particularly around health, or you’re not conscious of your wellbeing as much because of the choice of milk you’re making.

[00:08:34] Now I’m spending a lot of time talking about milk here because that’s the relevant example, but I could expand that to many other food choice.

[00:08:42] So performative eating is just that. It’s the act of choosing or consuming certain food based on how it’s perceived by other and by society rather than by your own internal signal. Like hunger satisfaction tastes, cultural background, nutritional needs. It’s when you eat performatively, you are not eating.

[00:09:09] From a nutritional nourishment perspective, you are eating to signal something into the world, to signal virtue, to signal health, consciousness to signal discipline to signal your own morality. Into the world and those signal will shift depending whatever the dominant current food trend is at the time.

[00:09:35] Different nutritional trends at the time. And I wanna bring us all back to just recently, about five years ago. In the quote keto era. And how was in the depth of that in the first stages of keto about 10 years ago. As a nutritional expert, quote, nutritionist we typically are early adopter of health trends.

[00:10:00] And so about nine or 10 years ago, I was in the depth of keto. Which is the elimination of all carbs and positioning protein as the dominant macronutrient in your diet. And I used to be using my food choices and displaying my choices around food to be extremely protein dance and triggering conversation around me because when people would ask me like, why are you not eating?

[00:10:32] I don’t know, whatever fries or rice we were around, oh, that opened the door for me to claim my identity of being keto.

[00:10:40] And this ability to restrict, like to be so extreme in your restriction of carbohydrate made you feel morally superior and position you as somebody with discipline and strength and control from other people looking at you, thinking like other people would look at you and think, oh my God, I could never do that.

[00:11:01] There’s, she’s so filled with willpower. Right, that was the keto, that was now the oat milk versus the regular cow milk. It depends on theran and what is valued in the moment. But here’s a critical problem with performative eating To perform, you must override your interoception signal. Your hunger, your satisfaction, even your physical need, and your body is telling you one thing, but you are intellectually choosing something else in order to perform value into the world.

[00:11:43] And that is the foundation of disordered eating. It’s not about the food choice themself, it’s about the process of overriding. Your inner signaling, your inner needs to deprioritize or devaluing your own needs in order to make choices based on people’s perception of you. That’s the problem, or that’s what triggered the disordered eating behavior.

[00:12:17] So how can you recognize if you are doing this, one of the clearest sign that it is, that performative eating is present in your life is for an example, when you consider your plan of what you’re going to eat, based on who you’re going to be with. Who are the other people that are gonna be around you in the moment of eating?

[00:12:49] And what are their value, their priority, what you want them to think of you, right? How can you plan what you’re going to eat in order to manipulate people’s opinion of you? So who’s gonna be there? Where you are going to be eating. So very interesting enough in that co-living space, when I started to have casual chat with my co-living people, I quickly got to the point where nobody was lactose intolerant.

[00:13:22] They were just performing that because two of them. Once they got to know me and knew what I was doing and how safe it was to talk to me about these kind of thing. Because very quickly people get to understand like, I’m a different nutritionist and I have a podcast. So very often people start listening to my podcast that are living in the house with me, and all of a sudden, within usually a couple weeks, people start talking to me about their relationship to food and two people.

[00:13:53] We’re in a private conversation with telling me how they’re struggling with orthorexia, right? They didn’t know it was orthorexia, but within conversation, I quickly could see orthorexic behavior and also body image issue, right? So when you are, when you understand what performative eating, so some of you may.

[00:14:20] Come across this concept of the first time and you’re like, oh yeah. When I go out with certain friends, I make certain food choice to impress ’em. When I go to certain places, like going to a trendy coffee shop, I will for sure take the oak milk latte to impress the barista or impressed the people I’m gonna be sitting with.

[00:14:42] So if you choose food or you choose something differently because you’re eating alone at home where nobody sees you, versus when you go out and eat with family, with colleague, or your health focused friend, that’s a signal of performative eating. Another version of that that I personally live with, and it was very relevant in period of time when I was gaining weight.

[00:15:10] Right after a diet, I have many memory example of that where I became extremely vigilant about eating visibly healthy when I was in public. Because I wanted to manipulate people’s opinion of me that even though I was gaining weight, I had gained weight. I am fat. In the beginning of my journey of body acceptance, that was really relevant for me.

[00:15:40] I wanted to manipulate people’s opinion of me by making visibly what it was deemed to be healthy at the time. ’cause I wanted to avoid being judged by the fact that my body was. Larger, and I wanted to make sure that people didn’t think it’s because I was lazy or undisciplined. So I ate extremely healthy in front of people, and that’s in part was fueling my binge eating behavior because I was going out not making the choice I wanted to make, and then I would go home alone and start overeating the food I actually wanted to eat.

[00:16:20] That’s performative eating,

[00:16:23] and if you are a health professional, coaching someone, this is very present for people who. Are living in larger body people that are on a journey of body acceptance. The food choices become a preemptive response to judgment or fear of judgment.

[00:16:46] I, another way this can show up is people who have self-esteem. Challenges people will, people please through food, they’ll performatively eat some food or eat food that they don’t want to eat just to please other people. And I’m sure we can all relate to eating Anth, Mary’s Food and Pie, just because Aunt Mary is so passionate about her pie, even though you don’t feel like eating pie, but you’re just going to eat pie so that Aunt Mary can stop bugging you.

[00:17:23] By the way, that’s performative eating too. It may not be to value signal health or value signal restriction, but it’s to value signal. That’s okay. Aunt Mary, I love you. I love your pie. That’s performative eating too.

[00:17:38] I had a client one time who had significant emotional distress around family event, and we start coaching on that and I start asking a lot of coaching questions, Socratic type of coaching question and it wasn’t about trauma, it wasn’t about emotionally challenged relationship with specific family members.

[00:18:02] She just, every time she would come back from family reunion, she was in an emotional drain distress and exhausted. And we, and I came to realize was because of performative eating, because every time she went to a family event, she felt like she had to make. Certain choice, which is in our case, was restricting the cultural food.

[00:18:23] Linked or culture because for years she was a health professional and she was she was deep in the trench of wellness culture, which was white people’s food, and she was eating the white people’s food. Even at Family Event, which probably gather right now was a white culture background.

[00:18:42] And she continued that behavior because she had created this identity. Of health as a health professional and spent years dishing on the traditional culture of food as being unhealthy. And even though she was doing this intuitive eating journey now, she really had this identity of her who she was into the world, built around eating, quote.

[00:19:10] Wellness culture, food, and now she showed up in those family event loaded with their culture and traditional food and she said no to it, even though she would go home and cook the same food and eating alone because she didn’t want anybody to see her because she had spent all those years dissing these food and dissing her family or aunts or uncle or cousin from making these food choices and not being disciplined enough to.

[00:19:36] Cut these foods. You can see the situation there. And we had a lot of coaching and we had to separate her identity from what she was in the past to who she has. She literally had to do a coming out to her family in order to liberate herself from that emotional distress. So one of the, if you ask me like what is one of the main root cause of that is conditional self-esteem.

[00:20:04] What drives a lot of performative eating is the sense of self-worth, and particularly for women, that sense of self-worth has been built and socially conditioned that other people gives it to you. So it’s external externalized sense of worth through your performance, your ability to meet standard, your ability to do other things for the people, the ability to please people around that.

[00:20:31] We talked a lot about conditional. Self-esteem in Podcast 4 54. So I would say if you’re listening to this podcast episode and you wanna dig into that, the companion episode is episode 4 54. So you can scroll through the feed, it’s called Conditional. Self-esteem. So you want to go listen to that? I’m gonna, not gonna repeat that, but a lot of the performa performative eating is the outcome of that conditional sense of self-worth, particularly for women because of our social conditioning.

[00:21:07] And I wanna be clear, it’s not that performative eating is just a woman’s problem, but it’s very present in our world because of the way we are socially conditioned. But I gave you an example also, uh, an intersectional example of someone from another culture, another race who perform white people’s food in her circle.

[00:21:31] Um. And in this case, it wasn’t the gender that was forefront, but other, more the race and the culture that drove that behavior. So although it’s very present with women, it can be present at any marginalized identity as well.

[00:21:51] And I also wanna say though, I talk about it as performative eating. I could also talk about it as performative fitness, right? Is when we really like at a higher level is when we perform certain. Behavior because of the signaling that it gives to the world. Now I’m focused here on eating because that’s the spectrum of this podcast, but know that it is across all range of behavior.

[00:22:21] So if you look at the nature of the social system fitness culture example, right now running is really trendy. So typically people who are a runner are perceived as morally superior. People who don’t run diet culture will signal people that live in a thinner body as being morally superior.

[00:22:41] Wellness culture. We’ll signal people who are able to restrain dairy cow dairy milk as being morally spared. So you have to also look at the circle of, uh, social tran and also the intersectional circle around the behavior to determine if you are in a performative behavioral position versus something that respond to your innate cues.

[00:23:09] So we’ve been talking a lot about what it is, why it matter, why it’s prevalent for women. So what can we do about performative eating? Number one, if you are a health professional, if you are listening to this, the first thing is listening to the podcast and understanding. What is performative eating and recognizing your position of influence over those eating behavior in your population that you are serving and understanding.

[00:23:38] Questioning when people are asking you for advice, for coaching on eating behavior, are they displaying performative eating? And I I’ve said that in. Many, many podcast episodes, and I’m gonna say it again. If you are in a position of influence over people’s relationship to food, nutrition, or eating behavior prior to advising, counseling, anyone, the first thing we should do is evaluating their eating behavior, and that’s why I created the free non diet coaching assessment tool.

[00:24:13] And the first place to start is to assess your own eating behavior and see if you fall into the disorder reading eating range. Because performative eating by nature is in the range of disordered eating,

[00:24:27] which means you are much more likely to make food choices and perform eating behavior because of conditional self-worth.

[00:24:38] And if you don’t evaluate clients’ relationship to food first, you may very unfortunately spend a lot of resources within your relationship with your client, guiding them into what is perceived as healthy behavior around food. Like choosing almond milk instead of cow milk, not realizing that you actually giving tools to your client to engage in performative eating instead of intuitive eating and eating in a relationship to what their needs are.

[00:25:12] The first thing is evaluate yourself and also if you’re going to advi, give advice on relationship to food. Evaluate your client on their own relationship to food.

[00:25:23] And you can pick up those assessment in the show note relative to this podcast episode. Or come to my [email protected]. Right on the landing page, you will see multiple Q to get the non diet coaching assessment tool. And if you wanna train at that level, like if you wanna train on recognizing disordered eating and helping folks.

[00:25:49] Let go of performative eating and address the self-esteem that’s sitting below it and helping them redesign their eating behavior towards their inner signal of hunger, full and satisfaction. That’s what the non diet coaching certification is really for, is really to teach you those skill sets of coaching, intuitive eating and also.

[00:26:12] We haven’t said it so far in the podcast, but body image is sitting underneath a lot of performative eating behavior. Now, if you’re a woman on your own journey and you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re moving through this podcast, you’re like, oh my God, that’s me. And even if you are a health professional that is recently discovered, a weight neutral approach to health or intuitive eating, and you landed on my podcast and you’re like, oh my God, that’s me.

[00:26:43] Go to the same place, get the non diet coaching assessment and do the eating behavior assessment. But consider starting with my program called Groundwork is where we do the groundwork to reestablish your own relationship to food. And your own behavior around food and understanding intersectional coaching and understanding cognitive behavior coaching so that you can be in a better place to start professionally.

[00:27:11] Training inside of the non diet coaching certification. So groundwork and the non diet coaching certification are the two places where I can help you in, your journey out of performative eating. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next podcast episode.

[00:27:35] Stephanie: If this resonates with you, the next step is the groundwork, my Beyond the Food Foundational Program for Health Professional, ready to go beyond the food and rethink how they approach nutrition eating and health behavior starting with themselves. You can go to www.stephaniedodier.com/groundwork and join us now.