The Language You Use Around Food Is Powerful

The language you use around the foods you eat can have a powerful impact on your relationship with your food. By adding an emotional label to certain foods, either vilifying them by using words like ‘bad’ or ‘naughty’ or giving them a ‘high’ status and labelling them ‘good’ or ‘clean’ gives the food an emotional power. 

Using the words like ‘bad’ to categorise a food is judgemental and can lead to feeling guilt and shame. For example if you label cake as a ‘bad’ food, any time you eat a piece of cake you’re going to feel guilty because you hold judgements that it is wrong to eat cake. Making a rule that you can never eat cake isn’t healthy or balanced! Changing the language you use about food can be a powerful way to improve your relationship with your food and yourself. 

We can either take away all labels around food to encourage neutral feelings about all foods, or if you still want a label for foods you could try the following.. 

‘Every day foods’ or ‘energy foods’ are highly nutritious that you eat every day. For the foods that you love to eat but they offer little nutrition to meet your health goals, you can try thinking about them as ‘sometimes foods’ or ‘mental health foods’. 

Now you wouldn’t feel healthy or energised if you ate cake everyday but living a healthy life means having cake (or foods such as soft drinks, chocolate, alcohol, lollies, pastries or take away) some-times. As ‘sometimes’ foods, they’re not bad, they’re eaten sometimes when you still make room for foods that have a higher amount of nutrition. 

Foods with higher nutrition that we eat every day are; fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole-grains, nuts, seeds, lean protein, fish and dairy. 

There is room for all foods on our plate!