Ep. 36 Why You Feel the Need to “Make Up” for Eating—and Punish Yourself

How many times are you around a group of women and they're saying, oh, I was so bad for eating that dessert, or I'm going to 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? Yeah.

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 want to 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 physically.

from our family, from the culture, and then we enforce it on ourselves.