Why the inner critic thrives around eating
When your inner critic is a dominant force, it can rule all aspects of your life but eating patterns is where it can show up most. When it comes to working with clients with disordered eating and body image issues, I find it’s usually the biggest issue to overcome.
This is because there is so much latitude that can be linked to eating habits. From how you feel about your appearance to comparison to others, to weight targets and the latest health advice. There’s also constantly conflicting input from social and traditional media, marketing messaging and the opinions and attitudes of friends and family.
What it actually says
When it comes to feedback about your eating, your critic can be sneaky and relentless. It keeps up the pressure by continually moving the goalposts.
It will berate you for eating too much or too little. Tell you you’ve eaten too much of the ‘bad’ stuff and not enough of the ‘healthy’ stuff. Compare how you eat to others. Or pile pressure on if you’ve not met your targets, whatever they might be.
The critic’s list is endless. Because when it’s not analysing what you’ve eaten, it can broaden out to the impact what you eat has on your figure, your mood, your confidence etc. It’s easy to feel trapped in your eating patterns and find it difficult to loosen the critic’s hold.
The origin story can be complex too
I’ve written in other posts about the ways in which childhood messaging and events can set the foundations of your inner critic. But I think when it comes to eating patterns, they can shift throughout your life, and this gives your critic new stories to get its teeth into.
Mid to late teens are a particular period where food issues take hold. It’s when someone really starts making decisions for themselves and has to deal with a lot of different experiences and influences for the first time. This is often coupled with becoming more self-conscious about their appearance and food can become a way to gain some kind of control when they’re feeling all at sea.
But there are other situations during life that can complicate your food story. Perhaps a significant weight gain, the aftermath of pregnancy, medical issues like diabetes or medical procedures. All of these kinds of issues can alter your relationship with your body, and the inner critic adapts quickly. This means the origins of your food issues can evolve over time.
What the critic is actually doing
In my previous post in this food series, I explored four specific food fears. These were fear around eating out, fear caused by counting calories, fear of certain foods and the fear that weighing yourself generates.
Any of these fears, individually or combined in some way, can be the outcome of your critic driving the agenda. They are the outward representation of the critic’s narrative.
This is the voice that is linked to the ‘food noise’ that many people speak about. Food noise has become a more mainstream term since the increase in popularity of weight loss medication. Eating can become the first thing that enters your head in the morning and the last thing you think about before falling asleep. When the inner critic is keeping food as a central issue, the noise can become so loud, it dominates everything.
Understanding your eating patterns with kindness
Knowing that your inner critic operates from a place of fear can throw a light on why it’s so relentless. From the ways in which your childhood messaging sets your eating blueprint, to the ways it shows up through fear and how those fears drive your critic, understanding what’s behind your eating patterns can be really beneficial.
Shifting those habits can involve work on your self-worth, confidence and self-care together with overhauling your thought patterns. But understanding the foundations of your eating with kindness is a good place to begin from.
You can read the previous posts from my eating series together with a post about the inner critic which you might find interesting by clicking on the boxes below:
