You don’t need to “earn” or “deserve” food.

Food is not a reward or punishment. Food is fuel. 

And does not have to be earned to eat it.

This typically happens with high-calorie, nutritionally less dense foods — aka “junk foods”. The problem with this is the more we do it, the more we associate food with how we feel or what we do. 

Many of us grew up being taught and hearing adults talk about “earning” food. They can eat ice cream because they “earned it” by eating “good” all week or working out. We could have a sucker because we were good at the store or have pizza because we won our game. If you ate your carrots, you could have cake. Which made it so that, even if you liked carrots on their own, your body started to see them as the obstacle or chore to get through to access the cake. 

While there is a benefit in defining what moderation looks like for you in your diet and knowing that we can’t just eat cake nor can we just eat apples or spinach and get all of the nutrients we need to take care of our bodies, moderation can be defined without scaling or polarizing foods as “good” or “bad”, “healthy” or “unhealthy”. Instead, we can define it by a view of abundance.

Food is fuel, plain and simple.

We are allowed to enjoy it and deserve to get excited about it — buying it, making it, and eating it.

At the end of the day, if you want the cake, eat the cake. It’s just cake.

Take power and evaluation out of it.

Enjoy it. Check-in with your body as you eat it. And stop labeling the experience of eating it or assessing your worth after doing so based on your weight, appearance or activities. Stop assuming you have to control it or it will control you.

Once we can learn to see food from a neutral place, we can stop feeling like we are constantly in a power battle with it and just allow it to be a tool to nurture our mind, body and soul.