Guilt free eating can change us mentally and physically. We don’t always love our bodies. In other words, we rarely do. I could love myself a little more if I were few Kgs lighter, wouldn’t that be perfect? And I have been willing to treat my body as an experiment by trying one diet after another. Constantly reminding it, that it is not good enough.

After all, what’s wrong with that, everyone I meet has a new diet tip to share with me. Surprisingly, these tips do not seem to work. How many of us can relate to feeling guilty after a hearty meal? This Guilt is more menacing than it sounds. It caused me to eat less, pushed me to skip meals deliberately. Until I realized that it definitely is not working, instead I would feel bad about my body and lower my self-esteem. Hide further, instead of embracing myself. There were times I would not feel hungry at all because of all these experiments that I was performing on my body. I never realized that feeling guilt after eating is not a good thing.

Since hating my body was not working, I decided to love it the way it is. A simple act of eating guilt-free changed my body so much that it started feeling lighter in almost two weeks. And after following it for a few months, I am at a much healthier place than before. Not only my body, I feel much more peaceful in my mind too. My process is explained in the following steps

1. shunning constant reminders of being ‘not enough’.

How we talk to ourselves is extremely important. If most of our self-talk is criticism about how our bodies ‘should’ look, it makes it difficult for us to have a healthy relationship with our bodies. Therefore, we would repeatedly spiral out of healthy eating habits. Becuase we treat them as a cure for our physically unfit bodies, instead of including them in our lifestyle.

2. Get rid of short term diets

I can’t even begin to name the weird diets people undertake to lose a few pounds. The challenge with these diets is once we stop the diet, our body gets back to where it was. Moreover, the most challenging part is getting the feeling of being hungry back. Our hunger sensation almost dies because we are always controlling our eating habits, we don’t get to know how hungry we are, and that can also lead to under or overeating.
These constant changes in diet keep putting the body in low energy state and will often lead to binge eating because of hunger sensation that died a long time ago. Some people feel comfortable having one meal a day and few feel good through intermittent fasting, these are good only if you can sustain them for the long term.

3. Eliminating guilt from diet

It was one challenging ingredient to remove. Every time I would eat until I was full, I would feel this guilt that I am deviating myself from my physical goals. This weird stress that I will have to start all over again because of one unhealthy meal was devastating to my self-esteem. Every time I would feel this way, I would go back to abandoning my current goals and plans and postpone them further. It is not a healthy state to be mentally, or physically. I decided not to feel guilty at all about how much I ate. For a few days, I ate a more than I normally would, but gradually I shed to a more sustainable diet. Guilt free eating helps us getting more control of our bodies.

4. Get the natural hunger back

Keep yourself well-hydrated. We are not talking about the hunger pangs we get after dieting or starving ourselves. We want to focus on hunger natural to the body, which guides us on being full or tells us that it is time to eat. The best is to follow your feelings. Whenever you feel hunger pangs, have water, and if you still feel hungry, then it is time to have something to eat. It may be hard to figure in a few days, but you will feel more attuned to yourself once you figure out how you feel hungry. It also helps with emotional eating as we are more mindful towards our hunger sensation.

5. Compassion towards the body

There is always a fine line between I want to achieve a definite fitness goal, and I am not good enough until I reach that goal. I went a little on the unhealthy side. I would halt my plans for even clicking a photograph until I was ready. Finally, removing guilt from eating also helped me in having a healthy relationship with my body because I was not ashamed of it. Yes, there will always be goals to be better than I am right now, but for that, I don’t have to hate the place I am presently at.