I have to admit. I haven’t always disliked this term. I too got sucked into the image of beautiful health bloggers, green juices and overflowing vegetable bowls. I actually love those things and so it wasn’t a hard sell. But what I began to question is the judgement that comes along with terms like these.
Sure, a move back to wholefoods has its advantages, but making foods 'good, bad, clean and dirty' can promote feelings of guilt, morality and shame. And food eaten from this place will never make you feel good no matter how 'clean' it is.
Clean eating also doesn’t take into consideration that there is more to eating then just nourishing and sustaining our bodies. While health is a value of mine, I believe that health is holistic and shouldn’t only focus on the 'physical' but also the mental, emotional and spiritual.
Food is there for pleasure, for joy, for connection, for love and for satiation. A good croissant for me is one of life's greatest pleasures. I’ve had times in my life when I cut them out for various reasons and while my diet looked super 'clean', I was miserable, felt deprived and ended up binging in secret on all the foods that I wasn't allowing myself to eat and more.
While terms like ‘clean eating’ may have come from a good place (as big business often doesn’t have our best interests at heart), and so highlighting some of the issues with eating lots of processed foods is helpful.
I still don’t think the answer is making food and eating a moralistic activity or using didactic language such as, 'clean', 'good' or 'bad'.
I especially don't believe in basing our self esteem in our food choices.
All foods can play a role in our life and the more we tune into our needs, the better able we’ll be to listen to what it is we truly need and want in each given moment.
All of this to say, we need to get back to connecting to our bodies and our intuition. To feel into how certain foods make us feel and then to make choices based on that information. We need to take into account All of our needs. This includes emotional, physical and spiritual and then to eat from a place of allowance, pleasure, self love and wellbeing.
We should feel free to choose foods that make us feel good on every level and then also sometimes to not.
The most important thing is to stop judging yourself. Your food choices don’t mean anything about you as a person or how you’re measuring up in this life.
