Cookies vs Celery: Why Your All-Or-None Thinking With Food Is Interfering With Your Health

Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, I’m Katy Harvey and prepare your heart, because today’s episode is probably going to ruffle some feathers. It’s probably going to make you uncomfortable. You’re probably going to feel very called out (in a loving way, of course). 

AND this episode is one that can quite literally transform your entire relationship with food – if you allow it to.

Now this isn’t going to be one of those warm and fuzzy mindset shifts that feels good right away. 

It’s going to be something that is probably hard for you, and you’re going to give me the side eye at first, and you’ll probably notice some resistance bubbling up inside of you. You might even feel anger. 

That’s ok. I can take it. I’m here for the difficult conversations. And I’m willing to tango with your questions, and your objections, and your “Yeah, but’s.” I’m here for it. I eat this stuff for breakfast. 

Here’s the thing: The reason that I am willing to go toe-to-toe with diet culture and your lingering diet mentality on this is because I know that this “good/bad food” mindset is not only holding you back from making peace with food – but it’s also interfering with your health. 

And I know that if you can make this shift in how you are thinking about food, it’s going to not only free you up to have the peace and freedom with food that you have so deeply yearned for – it’s also going to allow you to ACTUALLY tune into your body, to genuinely enjoy a wide variety of food and nutrients, and to honor your health in ways that legitimately work and are sustainable for the long haul. Allow me to show you. 

Before we dive into our main topic for today, you know what time it is…We’ve got some Wellness Woo to talk about. 

Wellness Woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health, but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense. 

Today’s Wellness Woo is: Intermittent fasting – I cannot believe I haven’t done this one yet, but according to my spreadsheet I haven’t, so buckle up because here we go.

Intermittent fasting has become a buzzword in recent years, and the idea is that you only allow yourself to eat during certain hours of the day so that your body is not eating (aka “fasting”) for a long stretch of time. 

There are a lot of versions of this where people will fast for 12, 14, 16, 18 hours. 

And while, yes, there’s some research that suggests it can help with certain health things like blood sugar, I would also argue that there are a LOT of things we can do for your blood sugar or any other health concern and it doesn’t have to include fasting. There are many other ways to achieve improved health outcomes without doing glorified restricting.

There are several issues that I, as a dietitian, have with intermittent fasting:

• We already have a built-in fast overnight while we sleep. That’s good enough for your body. 
• IF teaches you to override and disconnect from your body’s signals. Would you do intermittent peeing? 
• It’s another form of all-or-none thinking which we are going to be discussing in this episode. And I think that’s part of why people are drawn to it…
• It can limit you socially
• Your body can’t tell the difference between when you are choosing not to eat, vs when there’s a famine and no food available. Starvation and not letting yourself eat when you are hungry is not a health-promoting behavior. 
• For some people it basically just functions as restricting and binging. 
• If a client came to me and was describing their eating and they were doing intermittent fasting but didn’t tell me that’s what it was, and they only described their behaviors, my radar would be going off for disordered eating. I wouldn’t be sitting there thinking how proud I am of them for how healthy they’re being. I would legitimately be concerned.

I have also worked with a lot of the casualties of IF who eventually found their way to IE and were ready to look at their relationship with food, and the people who have done IF are often some of the individuals I work with who are most disconnected from their bodies, and from what normal eating looks like that I have seen. It takes a while to un-do all of the psychological and physiological damage that IF causes. 

And I just don’t see how it’s worth it. Like I said, there are a lot of ways to improve your health, and even if this theoretically help with certain things, I think the costs by far outweigh any potential benefits.

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, send it to me at rebuildingtrustwithyourbody@gmail.com. 

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…Why you labeling food as good/bad or healthy/unhealthy is actually interfering with your health. 

Let’s first do a visualization. I want you to imagine the highly skeptical part of you that thinks what I’m about to say us total BS, and to let that part know that you hear her, you understand her point of view, and let’s ask her to go ahead and have a seat off to the side in the corner. Make her a comfy spot with a blanket where she can relax for a bit. That part needs to step down so that you can open your heart for this conversation, and be willing to entertain these perspective shifts that will probably go against everything you’ve ever been told about health and nutrition. 

And trust me, I’m not here to lie to you, or to gaslight you. I’m not here to blow smoke up your butt and pretend that you can just eat whatever the heck you want, whenever you want, and that this is going to make you healthier. That’s not at all what I am about to say. This conversation is so much more nuanced than that. 

Now let me set the stage by saying this…

I care very much about your health. I deeply understand how nutrition works in your body. I am trained and licensed as a registered dietitian on the medical side of eating – and that background and expertise is the foundation of what I’m going to teach you here today. I’m not some self-proclaimed nutritionist off the internet who took a 3 hour webinar and claims to be an expert. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in dietetics and nutrition.

I don’t say this to brag. It’s actually kind of uncomfortable to talk about because I don’t want to come off as arrogant. I’m simply saying this because I know that there’s going to be part of you that has a hard time hearing this episode, and part of you that doubts some of the things I’m going to say. And I know that you’ve heard a million other people online, and even doctors, say basically the opposite of what I’m about to say. I want you to remember that even doctors (let alone social media influencers) have little to no training in nutrition. Doctors might get a 3 hour lecture in all of med school. Dietitians spend 6 years, and thousands of hours in our training. We understand it at a much deeper level. 

I also care deeply about science, and research. AND I care deeply about not just reading the research headlines, but actually looking at how the studies were done, and what the limitations might be. Because you can find “evidence” to back up pretty much any health claim you want to make. This is ESPECIALLY true with nutrition research, and weight-related research. We have to look at it with a critical eye.

So again, I’m not here to lie to you about food just to make you feel good. And I’m certainly not paid by Big Food, Big Pharma, or Big Sugar. Still waiting for those checks to roll into the bank, and I have a hunch that I won’t be seeing that money any time soon. (It always cracks me up when I see those accusations online – I can assure you that dietitians are not being paid off. Most dietitians honestly aren’t paid very well compared to other healthcare providers. So let’s just get that argument out of the way.) 

Why All-Or-None Thinking with Food is Harming Your Health

When I say “all-or-none thinking,” what I am referring to is when you are doing things like:

• Labeling food as good/bad or healthy/unhealthy
• Telling yourself that you blew it because you ate a bunch of potato chips
• Thinking you’ve been a good person for eating a salad
• Doing things like eating the rest of the cake or the rest of the bag of candy so that it’s gone and you don’t have to fight the urge to eat it anymore
• Going on a spree to get rid of all the junk food from your pantry (even using the term “junk” I would consider all-or-none thinking)

This type of dichotomous, or black and white, thinking is what is considered in the field of psychology to be a “thinking error,” also sometimes called a “cognitive distortion.”

Cognitive distortions are defined as inaccurate or irrational thought patterns that can negatively impact how you view yourself or how you see the world.

How does that apply to this type of thinking about food?

When you are thinking of foods like fruits and vegetables as “healthy,” and foods like ramen noodles as “unhealthy,” this is not only inaccurate (which we’ll talk about in a minute), but it also has a negative impact on you.

Here’s why: When you are telling yourself how you should be eating mostly foods you consider healthy (which, it’s worth noting, that a lot of us have different definitions of what we consider healthy – and there’s no universally accepted definition of exactly what this means), you’re inadvertently increasing your own mental resistance to eating those foods. 

Have you ever experienced this? You tell yourself that you should eat a healthy meal of grilled chicken and veggies at home tonight, rather than grabbing takeout, but the thought of eating that chicken and veggies sounds so bland and boring, and you’d much rather eat the chicken parm or the burger and fries that you Door Dash. 

Telling yourself you should do something is a set up for NOT wanting to do it. Same thing with telling yourself you should clean the bathroom or fold your laundry. Suddenly you’re too tired, or you need to look something up on your phone, or you have an errand to run because almost ANYTHING sounds better than doing the thing we “should” do.

And on the flip side, when you tell yourself that you shouldn’t eat the slice of pie, or those chips and queso, or the leftover slice of pizza in the fridge – now that’s all you can think about eating. Nothing else sounds good, besides the things you’ve told yourself you shouldn’t have. 

Then what happens? Well, when you follow through and eat the chicken and the veggies, or the salad that you told yourself was the good choice, you feel like a good person. And when you give in and eat the naughty thing like the nachos or the pizza, you feel like a bad person. 

This is all-or-none thinking in action. Of course you’re not a good person for eating a salad, or a bad person for eating nachos. That sounds ridiculous when we say it like that, but it’s the way that this type of thinking makes us feel. 

And remember how I said that cognitive distortions are inaccurate or irrational ways of thinking that negatively impact how we see ourselves or the world. BOOM – this was a perfect example of how that plays out. 

The more that you are thinking of food as good/bad or healthy/unhealthy, the more you are setting yourself up to eat in an unbalanced way. It’s also a set up for binge eating. The other dark side of this is when someone does become really rigid with the healthy eating and develops orthorexia or another type of eating disorder. You see, these black and white ways of thinking with food can actually spiral into bigger issues. 

But even if it doesn’t become a full-blown eating disorder, it can still damage your health. Because when you’re stuck in your head, fighting with yourself about what you should and shouldn’t eat, and then only wanting the “bad” foods, and trying to force yourself to choke down the “good” foods, this usually doesn’t end up aligning with what your body actually needs nutritionally for your health. 

It puts you in that back and forth pattern where you might be able to be “good” with your eating for a while, but then the pendulum swings the other way and you go off the rails, and find yourself secretly hitting the drive thru when nobody is with you, or sneaking into the kitchen late at night when everyone else in your house is asleep to cut off slivers of the brownies on the counter that you were trying so hard not to eat. 

This type of thinking is creating and fueling the problematic food behaviors that you are trying to get a grip on. 

One of my clients has been doing incredible work wrestling with this lately. She had spent years and years doing all sorts of dieting, and of course with that comes the list of healthy/unhealthy foods, and the rules that she had to follow. So as she stepped into the IE world she has been trying to dismantle all of that old diet thinking, and she shared recently inside my FB group (which if you’re not inside it you should be, it’s called Intuitive Eating Made Easy and it’s linked in the show notes.)

She shared how she went out for lunch with her husband, and she was REALLY hungry, and she ordered a sandwich and some fries, which in the past she either wouldn’t have allowed herself to do in the first place, OR she would have polished off the whole plate because she would have felt like she was already being “bad” for eating it so she might as well go all the way. But this time she paid attention to what her body was telling her and ended up eating about half of it, and took the rest home to enjoy as leftovers the next day. 

So you can see how she actually ended up NOT overeating with this approach. She was able to enjoy the “bad” food without going overboard. (This is how that mysterious “moderation” thing that you always hear about works.)

Overall Patterns Matter More Than Individual Food Choices

You might be thinking that she still could have made a “better” choice and gotten some fish, or soup or salad. Because french fries are so bad, and that sandwich had bread and “Oh the carbs!” and all those knee-jerk thoughts that pop into our heads. But if she had chosen something that wasn’t satisfying, and wasn’t what she was hungry for in the moment, there’s a good chance that later on she would have ended up going overboard with food at home and raiding the pantry for some chips, or the freezer for some ice cream. Or she might have ended up eating a bunch of fries off her husband’s plate and then he feels kind of jipped of his meal. 

Here’s a big picture takeaway for you today: Your overall eating patterns matter more than your individual food choices. (If you’re taking notes, write that down.)

Let’s unpack that…

Am I telling you that it’s fine to eat french fries and therefore you should subsist on french fries all day everyday of your life? NO.

Am I telling you that nutrition doesn’t matter, and all foods are nutritionally equal, so it doesn’t matter what you eat? NO.

Am I telling you that because diet culture labels veggies and salads as healthy that you should never eat them because that would be the diet mentality? NO.

I am telling you that there is no single food on this planet that is inherently good or bad 100% of the time for 100% of people. 

A lot of my clients come to me thinking that they’ve already wrapped their mind around this, and that they’ve got it down. But as we dig in, they’ll often realize that they do actually still have some lingering food judgments that are getting in their way. 

Just because you’re letting yourself eat the donuts and the pizza doesn’t mean that you have fixed your mindset about them. 

That means that you’re no longer physically depriving yourself of these foods (which is AWESOME and necessary).

But if you’re still on some level thinking of those foods as “bad/unhealthy” then we are going to see what we call “mental restriction” playing out in some way, shape or form. And this can be really subtle, so sometimes people don’t even realize it’s happening. 

I had a client the other day who told me that she realized that she has been doing this. She’s been letting herself eat all the things, and she can see what an imperative part of her healing this has been. But she also said that she is now seeing that she wasn’t fully listening to her body. So, yes, she had permission to eat the things like cake, but she wasn’t also giving herself permission to say no to the cake when her body wasn’t hungry for it. Because she was doing another type of all-or-none thinking where she felt like she had to eat the thing that used to be off-limits just to prove that she can. 

So what we worked on was helping her brain to see that she has just as much permission to say YES to the food, as she does to say NO to the food. The permission goes both ways. 

If you want to do a quick assessment of where you’re at, and if you are truly having peace and freedom with food, I encourage you to take my free quiz. It’s called Discover Your Unique Path to Food Freedom, and it takes about 2 minutes, and based on your answers I’ll send you custom results that are tailored to where you’re at on your journey with tips, insights and resources for you to work with. It’s totally free, just go to nondietacademy.com/quiz to take it. 

Like I said, you might have surface level “food freedom” – but if you’re not going deeper to actually change the way your brain is wired to think about food, it’s only going to get you so far, and you’re going to have a hard time honoring your health.

When you start to see that no single food choice is going to make or break your health, you can recognize that when you are eating a wide variety of foods in the grand scheme of things, and when you are getting in different food groups throughout the day, that your overall nutrition will be fine and it will meet your body’s needs. 

When you no longer think of food as healthy/unhealthy, you’ll be much better able to look at what you’re eating and to see the gaps nutritionally and to fill those in and to balance out your meals and snacks in a way that supports your health without being depriving. I LOVE it when my clients arrive at that sweet spot!

Context Matters: Supportive vs Non-Supportive Scenarios With Food

I want you to also keep in mind that CONTEXT matters with food and nutrition. What’s “healthy” or supportive in one situation, might not be in another. 

If I have a client with diabetes, suggesting they eat a bowl of Fruit Loops as their breakfast probably isn’t going to support their needs very well. Now, if they want to eat Fruit Loops we’re going to make that work by pairing it with some protein and fat and making sure that we build a meal that’s satisfying, sticks with them, and balances their blood sugar. 

On the other hand, I am actually encouraging my son to eat more breakfast cereal right now because he just had some bloodwork done and his iron is low, and yes we’re working on eating meat too (it’s not always his favorite), but because I know that breakfast cereal is a good source of iron and that he likes it, we’re having fun with including it as a snack or breakfast that really supports what his body needs. 

Let’s do another example. I like to eat cold foods for lunch a lot of the time. So I might do something like a salad with lots of toppings, or a plate of finger foods kind of like an adult Lunchable with meat, cheese, crackers, and then maybe some grapes and baby carrots with some ranch dressing or hummus. That supports what my body likes and needs on those days. 

However, if I’m working with a client who has IBS and raw veggies tear up their stomach and make their symptoms worse, a salad or baby carrots isn’t going to support their body’s needs. They might need to have canned veggies that are really soft, or veggies that are cooked in something like a soup or casserole. 

How about an example with sweets? One of my clients likes to have something sweet at the end of her dinner. And she used to resist this so hard, only to find herself having multiple servings of desserts and sweets at night before bed. That wasn’t supporting what her body needed because she has acid reflux, and this huge snack before bed was then interrupting her sleep. So we shifted to honoring her desire for sweetness at the end of dinner by just including a little bit of chocolate or a small scoop of ice cream at the end of her meal, so she had the fullness and satiety from the meal itself, and the sweetness was just the cherry on top and a little bit did the trick. The sweet thing with her meal was supportive in this instance, whereas the sweets she was overeating at snack late at night was non-supportive of her needs.

You see, all foods can be supportive or non-supportive, depending on the CONTEXT. That’s the nuance here that I want you to understand.

Finding the Middle Ground With Food

What we are aiming for as you let go of thinking of food as good/bad is to recognize that at the end of the day, ALL food breaks down into some version of carb/protein/fat. And it’s those macronutrients that are getting absorbed through your small intestine and taken to your liver, and your liver determines what to do with it. 

By the time it reaches your liver, your body neither knows nor cares where that molecule of carbohydrate came from. It could have come from a Nutrigrain bar, a banana, some mac and cheese, or a piece of whole wheat bread or white bread. It’s still a carbohydrate molecule, and it’s still going to be used as such. 

When you realize that the judgments you have about food are simply stories that your mind is telling you, you start to understand that you can choose to rewrite those stories and to challenge those cognitive distortions that aren’t serving you. 

The research on dieting, restrictive eating, and food deprivation shows that it goes against your body’s biology, and your body fights back against it by increasing your frequency of thoughts about food, your cravings for food, and it increases your odds of binge eating. 

The research also shows that the more a person diets and cycles through this restrict-binge pattern, the more it damages your health. In fact, dieting and weight cycling have been shown to correlate with both increased risk of cardiovascular disease and early death. 

But we rarely hear about that part of the story. Instead, all we hear about is how we need to eat less and lose weight for our health, and how gaining weight and being fat is so unhealthy.

Part of the problem with this narrative is that the more you try to lose weight, the more likely you are to GAIN weight. Dieting itself if the #1 predictor of weight GAIN, not weight loss.

That’s why, for your HEALTH, I care deeply about getting out out of the diet mentality, off the dieting rollercoaster, and to a place where you have peace, freedom and neutrality with food so that you can take care of your body in legitimate and grounded ways that don’t set you up to feel out of control with food which will damage your health. 

So how do we find that middle ground where you can take care of your health AND eat the foods you crave, without dieting or restricting? I call this my “Have Your Cake & Eat It Too” method – where you get to eat things like cake AND take care of your health.

Let me give you some examples of how to mix-and-match food together to find that middle ground:

• Frozen pizza w/ salad
• Celery with PB and chocolate chips
• Cookie with a greek yogurt
• Doritos with cottage cheese (don’t knock it til you try it!)
• Cake with glass of milk (you can do Fair Life milk for higher protein if you want)
• Snack plate with mini candy bar, cheese, a few crackers, and a sliced apple
• Burger, fries AND a side salad or broccoli
• Salad with side of fries
• Kids meal at McD – nuggets, fries, apple slices, Gogurt
• Fast food burrito or cheeseburger, and pair it with some fresh fruit at home

You see, when food doesn’t have the emotional charge that comes with a judgmental label, we get to just think factually about what it is (carb/protein/fat) and consider what we might want to pair it with.

It’s not sexy, it’s not as sensational as what you’ll see on social media, I can’t go around the grocery store making viral videos about all the foods you should NEVER eat – because when you think of food this way, it takes its place as just one important area of your life, but it’s no longer the thing that consumes your life. 

THAT’S food freedom. 

Wrapping Up

Let’s recap…

• Call out all/none thinking and why it harms health
• Overall patterns matter more than individual food choices
• CONTEXT matters – supportive and nonsupportive
• Ideas/examples of middle ground and balance (my Have Your Cake method)

Don’t forget to take the free quiz if you want to assess where you’re at and get some specific guidance and resources for what to work on. It’s at nondietacademy.com/quiz. And if you want a sense of community with others who are working to change the way they think about food, and to learn how to become a full-fledged intuitive eater so that you never have to worry about what to do the next time you’re craving a cinnamon roll, then come hang out inside my FB community called Intuitive Eating Made Easy. It’s linked for you below in the show notes. 

In case nobody has told you today – you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.