Approaching Fear Foods In Eating Disorder Recovery
If you suffer from disordered eating or an eating disorder, you may find yourself avoiding certain foods for various reasons. These “fear foods” are avoided or heavily restricted due to the distress or other uncomfortable emotions the food brings. During eating disorder recovery, incorporating fear foods into your diet is challenging yet rewarding.
Avoidance is not a productive way to manage stress. The more you avoid a fear food, the more anxiety builds up. Similarly, the more time and energy you spend thinking about the food, your mental health can deteriorate. It is necessary to work on your relationship with fear foods to remove their power over you. Below are some suggested steps to approach your fear foods in recovery.
Identify Your Fear Foods
Firstly, you should identify which foods bring up discomfort and anxiety. You could write these into a list. Determine how much fear is associated with each food. Working with a Registered Dietician (RD) or your eating disorder treatment team is helpful when you feel strongly about certain foods or food groups. They can work on an individualized treatment plan and help you slowly add fear foods to your diet.
Reincorporating Fear Foods
There are many techniques that your treatment team may use to help you reintroduce fear foods into your diet. One method is slowly adding small amounts of fear foods alongside safe foods. Doing this could help reduce the anxiety and fear surrounding certain foods. Over time and with exposure, these fear foods can become less anxiety-inducing and part of your normal eating repertoire.
Explore Intuitive Eating
As you progress in eating disorder recovery and with the guidance of your treatment team, beginning to practice intuitive eating can help reset your attitudes about anxiety-provoking food. Three principles, in particular, can help with this challenging aspect of recovery:
- Principle Three: Make Peace with Food. Deprivation can lead to craving, obsession, and or binging. This principle encourages you to allow yourself to eat food unconditionally; any food is fair game.
- Principle Four: Challenge the Food Police. The food police refer to any messages about food that make you feel guilty, ashamed, or stressed. However, your food choices do not warrant guilt, despite what the food police may say. Work on challenging and replacing these ideas with more neutral, supportive ones.
- Principle Five: Discover the Satisfaction Factor. This principle states that food should be satiating and eating what you want should be an enjoyable experience. Satisfaction can help reconnect you with fear foods based solely on how satisfying you find the food’s taste, texture, and temperature.
Seek Resources About Fear Foods
There are many accessible resources online that can help you begin to include fear foods into your diet. Abbey Sharp, a registered dietitian who makes YouTube and TikTok videos, has posted videos about adding her audience’s fear foods into balanced meals. She does not villainize any of the food. Instead, despite common perceptions, she comments on how delicious the food combinations are. BALANCE also offers free virtual resources, including webinars and free support groups. Check out this BALANCE webinar about challenging fear foods.
This process may take some time, but it is ultimately worth it. There is room for all foods in your diet. With work, eating will eventually feel pleasurable again, and the voice that says you should not eat certain foods will become quiet.
At BALANCE eating disorder treatment center™, our compassionate, highly skilled team of clinicians is trained to diagnose and treat the spectrum of eating disorders, including anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, compulsive overeating, and other disordered eating and body image issues. In addition to our full-time Day Treatment Program and Weeknight Intensive Outpatient Program, we offer individualized nutrition counseling with a licensed dietitian, meal support with a licensed dietitian, and a variety of other groups and resources to assist those seeking help for food concerns.
Our admissions team would be happy to answer any questions you may have about our programs and services. Book a free consultation call with our admissions team below, or read more about our philosophy here.
This post was written by BALANCE Blog Contributor, Elizabeth Low (she/her).
Elizabeth has graduated from San Jose State University with a sociology degree concentrating in social interaction and a minor in psychology. She understands firsthand the difficulties of having an eating disorder and body image issues. In the future, she plans to pursue a career in dietetics. She would love to help individuals have a healthy relationship with food and their body image. She hopes to actively counteract social messaging that is linked to disordered eating, overexercise, and body dissatisfaction.
