Latest / Unlearning Beautiful / Ep. 36 Why You Feel the Need to “Make Up” for Eating—and Punish Yourself
Transcript
- Kristina Bruce: You eat more than you intended, and almost immediately your brain starts figuring out how you're going to make up for it. You swear you're going to be really good tomorrow. Maybe you'll skip breakfast or you'll exercise more. This way of thinking can feel so normal, it doesn't even cross your mind to question it. But we weren't born believing that we need to punish ourselves for eating. We learned that. Today I want to unpack that whole cycle of eating, guilt, and punishment because this doesn't stop at what we eat. It can show up across all areas of our lives, how productive we are, how we look, how good of a mom or partner we are. And once we start believing that we're only good when we're doing things quote unquote right, we're constantly looking for ways to fix ourselves, improve ourselves, or make up for where we feel like we've fallen short. Let's get into it. Welcome to Unlearning Beautiful, a podcast for women tired of trying to look good enough and ready to feel good from within. I'm your host, Christina Bruce, here to help you let go of the pressure to look right or do it all right, and reconnect with your inner guidance, your natural worth, and what truly makes you feel fulfilled. Because the freedom you're craving was never in how you look. How many times are you around a group of women and they're saying, ⁓ I was so bad for eating that dessert, or I'm gonna be really good this week? It's like most of us have grown up listening to that. And so we start to absorb these ideas about food, that some foods are bad and some are good, but even more so, not that the foods are bad, it's that I'm bad. And who wants to feel bad? I mean, who wants to feel like they're not good enough? It feels heavy, shameful. We learn that we're supposed to eat good or then restrict or compensate in some way to make up for our bad behavior. It's really this form of punishment. But let's look at where did we learn that this idea of punishment actually makes us better? We were taught this really early. If we were good as children, we were rewarded. And often if we were bad, we were punished. Now that's not the case for everyone, but I think we can agree that that's the common framework that's still playing out in our culture today. So you were either being a good girl or a bad girl, or you're a good student or you're a bad student. You have a good body or a bad body. It's really this dichotomy of I'm either being one or the other. And We wanna stack up more of the good and mitigate the bad. This idea really can go back to a lot of religious indoctrination. If you behave well, if you are good, you will be rewarded in heaven. And if you are bad or you behave bad, you will go to hell. That ideology is really in the fabric, the collective consciousness of our world. It makes sense that would just carry over to things like how we eat and how we move and how we look. If you've listened to previous episodes, you've probably heard me mention Don Miguel Ruiz and the Four Agreements or the whole body of work of the Ruiz family. And in their tradition, they talk about this as domestication. I call it conditioning. It's the way that we take on these ideas from our family, from the culture, and then We enforce it on ourselves. So we don't need anybody anymore shaking a finger at us and saying, Should you really be eating that? There's a voice now in our heads that's saying, Should you be eating that? And so this is happening for some of us on a near constant all day basis. And that diet culture completely reinforces that. It's fixated and obsessed about being quote unquote good and avoiding being bad. And the funny thing is, is that depending on the diet you're on or the community you might find yourself in, there's a variation on what that might be. The more interesting piece about this that I want to talk about is this idea of punishment, because there is really this element of we need to pay for what we did. So if we went outside of the rule of whatever diet or thing is we're following, we have to pay for it. And there's this understanding underneath that this somehow works. Like I'm supposed to do this. There's these ideas that if I don't punish myself, I'll never learn. Or if I don't enforce consequences, I'm just gonna keep doing it. Or if I'm too compassionate with myself, I'll just let myself off the hook. Punishment works to a degree. It can in the moment. make a change. But if we look at it, how often has punishment really worked? Like long term. You're punishing yourself, whether it's every day or once a week, and yet you still find yourself in the same cycles or the same behaviors. It really can't be that punishment works. And in fact I think it Create more suffering. We then feel bad and we keep trying harder to feel good. And then we fail at that. So we feel bad again. It just keeps the whole thing going. And it there it really just builds up more of a balance of negativity within ourselves. Because if you think about it, shaming yourself is not going to make you more compassionate. It just shuts down whatever is going on and says, no, don't do that. Do this. But without Any nuance or investigation or understanding in it. And that's gonna break us down eventually. This idea of good and bad and punishment and reward runs so deep in our collective mind. That it's doing it automatically without us even realizing it. It's just this very old pattern that's playing out for so many of us and just gets applied to food and gets applied to our behaviors. Now, usually if I have these discussions with people, the mind's gonna immediately start to jump to, well, does that mean that everybody is just excused for doing things that are hurtful or negative? No. Everything has consequences. But rather, what I'm giving is a different way that. we can relate to it, especially when it's coming to ourselves and we're just looking at our own behavior. Instead of immediately jumping to punishment, flip it to understanding like what happened here? What was going on? How was I feeling? What was I needing? What was I believing in that moment? What can I learn? These are all questions that we can ask of ourselves without the onslaught of shame and guilt and blame that We're so used to heaping on ourselves. And yet that weighs us down. It feels so bad. We are often using that heavy level of shame and guilt on our food choices or our exercise choices or the way that we look in the mirror. I mean, I think that's crazy. And I say that to put any blame on anyone, of course not. But like, let's look at this. Is that really? Necessary? Is that really something that we need to be doing to ourselves? Like shame and guilt and blame is heavy. And yet we'll lay it on because we ate a piece of cake? Like it doesn't make any sense. And yet we're doing it so automatically. Because again, it all comes down to I'm really trying to be good. I want to be good. And when we have this belief system that says, If you gain weight, you're bad. If you look young, you're better. Then we're gonna have to start abiding by that through these little daily choices that we're making about our food and our exercise. It's coming from this place of, I really just want to feel okay about myself. What do I need to do to feel good? And I want to posit that you don't have to prove anything, that you already are fundamentally good. And instead shedding the punishment. Is the best thing that any of us can do for ourselves to feel better. The very first thing is to start questioning the beliefs. Like, where did we get this idea that eating a piece of cake is bad? Follow that thread. Is it, well, I heard that sugar is bad and then that's going to make me sick, and then I'm going to die early? Like, is it come back down to something like that? Well, my God, like who wants to die early? That's fearful. So then of course it feels threatening. I got a Quick, make a different decision. But then it shows up in the way of punishment. But understanding is going to give us a better result. ⁓ I'm afraid of dying early. Okay, let me explore that. It brings us deeper, which I think we're kind of scared to go towards because what rabbit hole is that going to bring us down? But it's what we need to do, I think, in order to shift these patterns that really do run so deep. So if you found yourself overeating, Instead of punishing, we get curious. Were you hungry? Like had you not eaten earlier today because you were trying to be good or make up for something and then you binged later because you were just so starving. I was at my husband's work event and I had forgotten to eat lunch before I left, and then I ran out of time. And it was hours before the dinner was being served, and all they had were these bowls of candy. And I don't even like eating candy, but I was chugging glasses of iced tea and eating candy because I was so freaking hungry and I had no food on me and I was just waiting for dinner. Now in the old days of my dieting, I would have totally punished myself for that. But instead I was like, of course I did that. I was so freaking hungry. So having that understanding is huge. Were you stressed? And in that moment, you had no other way that you were able to cope with it. So you ate. Or you were seeking pleasure. I often find at the end of the day when we're really tired and a lot of people talk about night eating, they're looking for a stress release and they're just seeking pleasure. Well, there's different ways that we can look at exploring how to not be as stressed during the day or what maybe needs to change. Or maybe you were just celebrating and that's totally normal, but diet culture has convinced us that we shouldn't ever be eating quote unquote bad. And so that thought slipped in there. I mean, there's so many different ways that we can explore why we overeat or why we haven't exercised for a week if it's not obvious that don't require punishment at all. I don't believe punishment is necessary. Understanding is necessary in order to take corrective measures. Because if we don't understand, we can't really learn and we can't change. And punishment just shuts everything down and it cuts us off really from growing. And when we act positively from punishment, we're just doing it out of fear. We're just trying to avoid being punished, but we don't really learn. And now we're heaped on with this extra level of fear and shame that's just going to weigh us down. We can see this in the ways that it affects us in other areas of our life. We found ourselves not getting work done this day and immediately we'll punish ourselves like you're lazy. You need to push harder. And instead we can ask, okay, well, what got in the way? Like what was going on for me internally, emotionally, mentally, or when you lose your patience with your child and immediately the mind's like, you're a terrible mother. Or is that just my mind? You two, maybe. And instead ask, like, what was going on for me internally? This is where I why I love this work because It invites us to go within. And often when I've lost my patience with my daughter, something got emotionally triggered in me or I was exhausted. Well, I can actually work with that. I can't work with I'm a bad mother. So instead of making this goal about I'm gonna be so good this week, what if it's I'm gonna try to understand myself a little bit better? I'm gonna have some greater awareness. It's a really different way of relating to ourselves than punishment. And it's likely to give us results. Because again, we've been doing the punish reward thing for a long time and it just keeps us going in circles. When you're on this journey of making peace with your body and exploring these ideas and concepts, something that keeps coming up a lot for me is that this is really a journey about making peace with being human because So many of us who have struggled with dieting and body image have a perfectionistic tendency or a people-pleasing tendency. I can't get anything wrong. I need to do it all right. And a lot of it is a rejection of very human aspects of ourselves, aspects of ourselves that were rejected by other people and our caregivers in our early life. And so we started to learn to reject it ourselves. We were learning that I had to be good, I had to look a certain way, I had to behave a certain way, or I would be punished. And we've just been doing it to ourselves ever since. And I think all of us are just deeply yearning to feel like we are okay. We can put down that proverbial stick that we're constantly hitting ourselves with and realize that we're human. We're all doing the best that we can. And if you drop the idea that you are bad or wrong, doesn't that feel a lot better? And isn't that what we're hoping being good is going to give us a sense of relief of feeling okay? It's dropping the idea of we were bad or wrong in the first place that's going to give us that. It's not about there not being accountability or responsibility, but it's coming now from a very different place. Responsibility really means response able, the ability to respond. And yet we've often used the word responsibility as an attack. Or even as a form of punishment. You have to take responsibility. It's heavy. Well, it's a lot harder to be able to respond when we're feeling shame, when we're feeling guilt, when we're feeling unworthy, and when we're feeling less than. Let's reframe to the idea of responsibility, drop the self-blame and the self-punishment so that we actually can. Take responsibility, be able to respond more effectively in our lives. If this episode is landing for you today and you're realizing how often you are turning against yourselves in small or big ways, and you haven't already, I invite you to download my free guide to body peace. It's a place to begin exploring what it means to stop fighting your body. And start building a different relationship with yourself, one that's rooted in understanding instead of judgment. You can get the free guide at Christina Bruce.com forward slash guide or at the link in the description below. Look forward to being with you in the next episode. Thanks for listening to Unlearning Beautiful. If this episode resonated with you, follow the show and share it with another woman who's ready to see beauty and herself in a new way. And if you feel moved, Leave a rating and review. It will help this show reach more women who need to hear it. Remember, you're already everything you've been trying to become. Enough, worthy, and free. I'm Christina Bruce. Until next time.