What even IS a food rule?!

Breaking your food rules if you’re trying to ditch diet culture and eat intuitively can be extremely difficult and overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. You can break them! The first steps toward breaking them, however, is knowing what a food rule even is and what your own personal food rules are, and that is what I am here to help you with in this episode of The SociEATy Podcast!

A food rule is essentially an external factor that you’re allowing to be the primary or even only reason that you are not allowing yourself to eat a specific type of food. Food rules are affected by diet culture and what society tells us are good foods and bad foods, and it’s important to remember that you can still have food rules affecting your life even if you aren’t following them!

Because of how pervasive diet culture is, most of us probably have food rules that control our everyday lives, and a lot of those rules are sneaky about how they make their way into our lives and routines. The good news, however, is that breaking food rules is not out of reach! As I teach in The SociEATy, I encourage you to make a list of your personal food rules and make a plan to break them one by one. Even just breaking a small one is a lot of progress, and when it comes to how you break your rules, the great thing is that you can get creative and experiment (you probably know by now if you’ve been listening how much I love that word)! Remember that the ultimate goal is to neutralize all food, to see all food as nourishing in one way or another.

I also teach you how to make sure that a food rule has actually been successfully broken, especially since there is a crucial difference between a food rule and a food preference. It’s important to know that you have not done anything wrong if you come to find food rules popping back up in your life after you thought that you had gotten rid of them. I always say that food rules and unhealthy relationships with food are ways for us to cope with something else going on in our lives, and with diet culture being the vicious animal that it is, many of us use food as a placeholder for our problems. It’s totally normal and not irreversible! This transformation is not going to happen overnight!

Hit me up, and share with me the food rules that you’ve managed to break or even began to break! Brag about those food rules being broken! I would love to hear from you!

Time Stamps

[1:10] – Colleen introduces the topic of this episode – the definition of a food rule and how food rules are sometimes sneaky.

[2:48] – Colleen explains how you can still have food rules even if you don’t actively follow them.

[4:59] – Colleen offers some examples of food rules and how they manifest themselves, and she explains why food rules are bad for us and what they can lead to.

[8:30] – Colleen shifts gears toward the next subtopic of the episode – how to identify your food rules – and encourages us to engage in a written activity as we listen.

[15:05] – Colleen offers some tips on how to begin to break your food rules.

[16:23] – We learn how to identify whether or not we have successfully broken a food rule.

[17:58] – We are reminded that breaking food rules takes time, that it’s different for each rule and each person, and Colleen stresses the importance of self-reflection.

[19:28] – Colleen reassures us that it’s totally normal for food rules to try to come back even after they’ve been broken.

[22:20] – Colleen offers us visualization as a tool to combat negative thoughts about food.

[22:59] – We are informed about the difference between food rules and food preferences, and Colleen reminds us how this journey should be made up of experiments.