By the time I started working to eliminate bingeing, purging and food restriction from my life, I was scared of sandwiches. I was scared of pasta, and waffles, and muffins, and pancakes – and the list goes on. I was terrified that if I ate what I perceived to be unhealthy, fatty, carb-heavy foods, I would undo all of my hard work with fitness and dietary control and I would get fat.
It can feel impossible to undo years and years of thinking this way and to make peace with food. (Making peace with food is an intuitive eating practice where you give yourself permission to eat any type of food without restriction or guilt.) And I think it can be too much to expect yourself to make a clean leap from “I’m terrified of eating this” to “I’ll try to start eating this again and I’ll get better.”
This may be an unpopular opinion, but starting to incorporate “healthier” or “optimized” versions of foods into my eating helped me end some of these restrictive practices around food, and to make peace with certain foods. I put the words “healthier” and “optimized” in quotation marks because I don’t think everything we buy and eat needs to be a manipulated, enhanced version of the original thing. We don’t really need to buy protein pasta when regular pasta also has a decent amount of protein. We don’t really need to buy low-carb bread when regular bread provides us with much-needed carbohydrates for energy. We don’t really need to buy protein waffles when it’s easy to add eggs and other whole-food ingredients to our plate – which supports a more balanced breakfast anyway.
Starting to eat optimized foods can be a huge win in recovery
But if making peace with foods you’ve deemed off-limits can start with some of these “optimized” foods that are easier for you to wrap your head around, why not? It’s a huge win to eat a protein pancake when you haven’t eaten pancakes since you were living at your parents’ house, for example. It’s a huge win to try any version of these foods and to see that the world doesn’t end when you eat them. For me, the “optimized” foods were a gateway to enjoying the real, wonderful foods I’d been missing out on for so long.
And once you take the leap and start to get more comfortable reincorporating these “optimized” foods into your intake, you’re just a smaller step away from trying the “real” versions again.
Now that I’m on the other, healthier side of eating disorder recovery, I routinely eat a variety of pastas and breads and homemade pancakes and waffles and whole-fat dairy and all the good stuff. I rarely buy the “optimized” versions anymore, unless I’m curious to try something, or I’m feeling particularly ambitious about my protein intake.
A few “optimized” foods to try:
I’ve enjoyed these in the past when working to make peace with food.
This is not an ad. Just an ideas list. And keep in mind that the whole point of trying these “optimized” foods is to reintroduce them into our lives, to get comfortable putting them in our mouth, swallowing them, keeping them in our bodies, trusting that our bodies can handle this.The point is to then graduate from these “optimized” foods and get back to the real, wonderful, less-processed, original versions of them. To try those again and to trust those again, too.To fully heal that relationship over time. Sometimes we need to take baby steps. And that’s a start.
