By Dina Aldabbagh

Maybe without ever realizing it, we are constantly moralizing food. “I was bad today,” when they had dessert. “I’ve been good,” when they’ve been recently eating whole foods. “Bad,” “good,” like food is a moral principle. Like somehow bread is bad, so if you eat it, you’re bad. Avocados are good, so if you eat one, you’re good.

Bread can work against you, if you eat so much you’re sluggish. But…avocados can work against your goals as well. Maybe you want to lose weight so you think to eat avocados because they’re healthy. Well, they’re also high in calories so if you’re not mindful about portion sizes, you could unknowingly be putting yourself in a caloric surplus. By contrast, both bread and avocado absolutely can be a part of a healthy diet. 

Food’s not moral, it’s just food. It is, at the end of the day, a tool. On a basic level, to fuel you. More deeply, to make you feel good. Being fueled does feel good, but it’s not just about not being hungry — but rather being satisfied. Sometimes that means having chocolate…and that’s okay.

The problem with moralizing food is that it puts it on some pedestal. Thereby, giving it some level of power over you. Like you’re “weak” for wanting to order pasta at dinner, rather than a protein forward meal. Or conversely, you’re “strong” if you haven’t had any culturally-regarded “unhealthy” foods. But…it’s not that deep. It’s just food. A tool, like anything.

All the different aspects of our lives serve multiple functions. For example, relationships are a tool too. We don’t really think about them like that, because we deeply enjoy them, but they are serving a purpose. They stimulate your mind, help you live out new experiences, make you feel loved and secure, give you a partner to build life with and lean on. On a mechanical level, they’re a functional part of our lives. 

Food is no different. It’s a tool, in my eyes, to help you feel good. And gosh, sometimes that means getting the Dairy Queen blizzard. Other times, however, it means not — because it would make you feel sluggish or not give you the actual energy you need to sustain you for the day. At the end of the day, it depends on what you need in this moment to feel your best.

While, yes, food is certainly abused in some cases, we don’t need to moralize it like you can never just eat food for enjoyment. And, actually, I think taking away the morality from food does something paradoxical and yet profound: it makes each of your food decisions more honest. 

When you genuinely just need a dessert because you feel mentally exhausted and the sweet taste would bring you enjoyment…then you can be real about why you’re eating it. “I just want to enjoy this.” Full stop. No other reason. Just, the truth. 

When your motives — the real reasons you’re doing things — become plain, honest, and void of judgment or morality, then you actually empower yourself to make decisions based on what you actually need in the moment. Sometimes that’s, “I want this hearty meal to emotionally ground me,” and other times it’s, “I don’t want too much starch because I want to feel light.” 

Take away the judgement and you take away the charge. Suddenly, decisions are just functional. “I’m eating this for ‘this’ reason.” There’s no “you’re bad” or “you’re weak,” just: “you’re looking for a specific experience right now.” 

This advice may sound backwards if you want to live a healthy life — because discipline is the most marketed value in the health community — but it surprisingly has the opposite effect. You become more healthy because you’re not hiding your intentions from yourself in an attempt to avoid self-judgment. Discipline does not have to mean rigidity, especially if that leads to suppression — and therefore extremity. Rather, discipline can mean being centered with flexibility — promoting overall consistency. 

Instead of self-judgment, you’re actually just telling the truth to yourself and empowering yourself to make whatever decision you want. Then your desires become clean. When desires can just be sought after for the honest reason of “it feels good to experience this” then those same desires can feel free to change shape. Suddenly you’ll find yourself saying, “Actually, I want to skip out on dessert tonight because I’ve had it the last few days and I want to feel a bit lighter in my body.” That’s an honest and clean desire, with no judgement involved. 

The choices you make then just become a means to an end — just simply for desire fulfillment. When you suppress your desires, however, and never let yourself just enjoy food because it tastes good, then you make food seem like this “unsafe” thing. It becomes so charged. Unfortunately, because we have to eat to survive, you literally cannot avoid thinking about it. This intense moral charge behind food then puts pressure on every single decision you make about food in your day.

That’s too much. Remove the shame, but stay focused on the outcomes. That’s ultimately the consequence of viewing food as morally neutral — when you remove the emotional charge behind it, you are left with the result of how you feel. Therefore, you become much more empowered to look honestly at the consequence of how a certain food choice made you feel, and adjust accordingly. You take away the pressure of right and wrong, good or bad, strong or weak, and are cleanly left with results. 

There’s no need to “earn” food or “deserve” to eat a certain way, there’s just what you want to do. Desire for desire’s sake. So then, interestingly, if you desire to lose weight, that guides your choices too. Food becomes instrumental, functional, a vehicle for a certain experience — whether that be for a particular feeling in your body, losing/gaining weight, or just enjoyment. 

Removing the moral weight is what will effectively enhance your healthy choices. For some time, you may be able to use restriction and sheer-willed discipline to make these choices, but in the long run for maintenance purposes, that will often just produce food-anxiety, suppression, and subconscious rebellion. However, when we honestly assess what we want and freely choose it, that freedom changes how we relate to our desires. You are then not motivated to indulge for the sake of being “worthy,” but simply just make intentional and conscious choices that are grounded in present-moment awareness.

Anytime we assign morality to a neutral or functional part of life, we risk creating guilt, shame, or a sense of weakness. I’m advocating a form of radical honesty: stripping away judgment to empower choice. By removing that emotional charge, you’re seeing your own experience plainly: this is what I want, this is why, and that’s enough.

This kind of self-honesty confronts the reality of your experience right now — your cravings, your energy, your emotional state — without imposing morality or expectation. In the practice of doing what you want without shame or pretense, you ultimately feel less controlled by things. Therefore, this approach to eating food removes the strategy and builds trust in your own intuition. 

A key I want to bring to your attention is that you may be afraid that — if you don’t behave rigidly around food — you will “let yourself go.” My suggestion is that this principle works paradoxically. The more freedom you give yourself, without shame — this is not the same as giving into compulsions, but rather fully choosing to do what you want — the more moderate your eating becomes. Because then enjoyment is normalized, and not something that you have to fight for. 

Your choices will regulate. Guilt and shame are attempts to maintain a certain standard of behavior, but they typically have adverse effects. You need to eat food to live; it was always meant to be a daily part of your life — and I don’t want you to live under the pressure of shame, anxiety, and stress with something you have to encounter numerous times a day. 

Maybe in the pursuit of making choices freely and simply based on desire, your body could temporarily fluctuate. However in the process of normalizing desire as a healthy part of life, so too your choices will become moderate. If we want sustained health, we must understand that comes from balanced choices, meal satisfaction, and the letting go of shame.

Freedom does not mean you will get fat — just in case you need to hear it said. It just means you will no longer live under a rigid, judgement-based regime disguised as morality.