Good Food vs. Bad Food

People with eating disorders usually have a habit of classifying foods as either “good” or “bad”. They aren’t alone in this. Society also encourages this reasoning. Unfortunately, thinking about foods as either “good” or “bad” can actually make your eating disorder worse.

The idea that “good” food/”bad” food judgments can make Binge Eating Disorder worse might not seem to make sense. It’s easy to think that labeling foods as “good” or “bad” is an important first step in overcoming binge eating. People often think that if you can avoid “bad” foods, your problems with binge eating or compulsive eating will be solved.

But the problem wouldn’t really be solved, because the problem is binging. It doesn’t matter what you actually binge on. What matters is if you are eating an abnormally large amount of food in one sitting, feel like you cannot control your eating, feel numb or checked out while binging and are eating in response to emotional triggers. When you focus on whether your binge food is “good” or “bad”, you are taking your attention away from the real problem. Then you can’t see the forest for the trees and finding a real, permanent solution for the root cause of your binging becomes far more difficult.

Part of what makes BED so difficult to overcome is that we tend to zoom in on certain aspects of our eating. We overanalyze those parts of the problem and put all of our energy into trying to control them. Usually, this doesn’t fix the problem because it ignores all the other issues tangled up with BED.

To overcome BED, you have to stop yourself from drowning in the details. You have to zoom out and try to see the whole problem, not just one part. If you try to fight the urge to binge by concentrating only on certain aspects of the overall problem, you will never have enough information to come up with a strategy that eliminates binging, dieting and obsessing from your life.

If you catch yourself thinking about food as “good” or “bad”, it should be a sign that you should immediately stop your train of thought and try to see the big picture of what’s going on in your head right at that moment. This can be an extremely difficult thing to do, even though it sounds simple. Usually, your thoughts about “good” food and “bad” food are distracting you from other thoughts that are more difficult for you to bear. Your brain has probably gotten really good (and fast!) at sweeping these uncomfortable thoughts and emotions under the rug. If you are like I was, you may not even know those thoughts are there at all- that’s how efficient your brain can be at blocking out negative thoughts and feelings. It took me a long time to make my brain slow down enough for me to see what thoughts and feelings it was having in the background right before I would get the urge to eat.

Some people with BED have brought “good” food/”bad” food to another level. For them, labeling foods is a big deal, and it is very hard to stop thinking that way. It might be tempting to just skip trying to change your thinking on this subject, because it is going to be very difficult to do. You have to realize that the more you care about avoiding “bad” foods, the more you are wrapped up in the dirty details of binge eating disorder. If you continue to think of food in this way, you will just continue struggling against the urge to binge and diet, never being able to see the big picture. Your energy and effort will be diverted to a futile cause.

Basically, you need to see the forest, so try not to put yourself right amongst the trees by continuing to label food as “good” or “bad”.

For many people fighting BED, viewing all food as just food “legalizes” all of it. That means there is no more “good” food or “bad” food. All of it is just food.

Thinking of all food as just the same can be downright terrifying for someone with an eating disorder. The immediate fear is that if you legalize all food, you are just going to overdo it on foods you used to call “bad”. Then you will binge endlessly on them, gain lots of weight and be miserable.

You’re only partly right on that, though. For most people with BED, stocking the house with large amounts of binge foods to keep on hand just in case a craving hits…that’s sacrilege. Will you binge endlessly on the food? Probably at first. And if that happens, you may gain some weight. However, if you keep trying to stop labeling food as good or bad and you keep your stocks full, something strange happens. In the long run, you will binge less.

On the surface the whole idea sounds absurd. But when we think about it a bit, we can see how it would work. Often, people with BED will eat something just because it’s “bad”. Sometimes we’ll binge because it felt like we had to eat that food ASAP, or it would be gone and we would lose the chance to eat it. This creates a sense of deprivation, which makes us want to eat even if we’re not hungry. In the long run, you will stop feeling compelled to binge because you feel like there will be a shortage of food later. You will stop feeling the need to eat something “bad” just to sabotage yourself or rebel against yourself.

Black and White Thinking

Thinking of foods as “good” or “bad” is also counterproductive to our recovery in another way. It is Black and White Thinking, which is a way of thinking that causes a lot of mental anguish for people with BED (and for others as well). Black and White Thinking is when you are looking at everything in a situation as either all good or all bad. There are no shades of gray. There’s no wiggle room for reality. There’s just GOOD and BAD. That’s it.

The problem with thinking this way is that it doesn’t reflect reality. It ignores the fact that most things in the world fall into the “gray” category, not purely black or white. When your thinking is so different from reality, your thoughts and judgments don’t help you navigate in the real world. You’ll will have a thought, try to apply it to help you in real life and it won’t work because it just doesn’t fit.

But usually, your brain will try to make it fit. That’s just going to cause you a lot of stress, because you are trying to do something unrealistic.

That reasoning is flawed. Binging doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with good food or bad food. A binge involves an excessive quantity of food, eaten in response to emotional discomfort. The foods you eat during a binge don’t matter. You could binge on salad or oranges or broccoli. Attaching the “good food” label to these foods doesn’t change the fact that you ate an excessive amount of it or that you ate all of it to avoid troubling thoughts or feelings.

You might be thinking, “well, yeah, but at least if I binge on broccoli, I might not gain as much weight.” And here is where we make the mistake that can cost us our recovery. If we focus on losing weight, we’ve just sunk deeper into our eating disorder. Binge eating disorder isn’t just about binges. It is also about the “diet mentality” and obsessing about food and weight. Binging, dieting and obsessing are all distractions from the real problem. The more a person with BED focuses on those things, the more he avoids facing the feelings that those distractions cover up.

The solution is to stop yourself from hyper-focusing on distractions like dieting and try to identify the feeling or situation that is really bothering you. Ask yourself: if I wasn’t thinking about food/dieting/weight right now, what would I be thinking about? If you can’t identify what’s bothering you or you understand the issue but still can’t stop yourself from binging, that is okay. Be patient with yourself. If you keep trying, you will eventually succeed, so just try the process again the next time you feel the urge to binge.