Rebellious eating, self-responsibility, and mindset:
Have you attempted intuitive eating, hoping you would easily eat according to your hunger and fullness cues, only to end up with rebellious eating habits?
This is totally normal.
Before I explain the reason why rebellious eating happens, let’s discuss exactly what it is.
What is Rebellious Eating?
Rebellious behaviour is essentially about reclaiming your power or authority over your life in response to a limitation, rule or restriction. Rebellious eating is behaviours that are fundamentally centred around you claiming back your power over your eating choices. It is the opposite of peaceful or normal eating.
Peaceful eating is what happens after you heal your relationship with food and the damage that was done by restricting food.
Rebellious eating examples include:
- binge eating
- overeating
- compulsive eating
- night time eating
- emotional eating
Causes of Rebellious Eating
These eating behaviours occur when your innate body wisdom responds to any form of food restriction.
For example, suppose there is a particular food you resist bringing into the house for fear you can’t control yourself around it. In that case, there is a good chance the moment that food is present, your body will rebel against the arbitrary rule that you shouldn’t eat it, resulting in you binging on the food. This pattern will continue for as long as restriction exists.
Diet culture encourages the use of willpower, self-discipline and, in some cases, shame tactics to control rebellious eating habits. If dieting were never introduced 60-plus years ago, these behaviours also wouldn’t exist.
The food itself is not the issue. The issue lies in the thoughts and mindset you have toward certain food.
Self-Responsibility and Mindset
The only way to end rebellious eating is to take responsibility for your eating behaviours. Taking responsibility is being able to look at your eating habits with curiosity and compassion without judging or blaming yourself. For as long as you give away your power to the external source telling you how to eat, you will continue to struggle with rebellious eating behaviours.
When looking at your behaviours, first investigate how you were feeling before you engaged with rebellious eating. Feelings are created by your thoughts so the next step is to explore the download of thoughts that created the said feeling.
For example, after you binged on a bag of chips, you discovered that you were feeling shame because you had the thoughts that you can’t have chips, chips are bad and therefore you are bad for eating them. The solution isn’t to stop eating chips but to change your thoughts toward them so that you no longer feel shame and binge eat them.
It’s entirely possible to change your rebellious eating behaviours by creating peaceful thoughts toward food.
What you’ll learn listening to this episode on rebellious eating, self-responsibility and mindset:
- What rebellious eating habits are
- Why rebellious eating happens
- 3 steps to creating peaceful eating habits
Mentioned in the show:
Undieted Health Habits Checklist
Undiet Your Life Coaching Program
