In food and body healing, the grief of letting go of the thin ideal (as discussed in Part 1 of this 2-part series) can be formidable. But body grief isn’t the only sorrow that surfaces on this journey.  Change, whether for better or worse, always carries some element of grief, and changes in eating habits are no exception. But why do we feel grief about our eating when our relationship to food is ostensibly getting better?

To untangle this surprising situation, let’s discuss the first of two big ways grief shows up in our improved eating habits: the grief of letting go of food as salvation.

our brains naturally release dopamine in response to reward signals sent at the first taste of food. This pleasure is normal, and represents biology at its finest. The brain wants to help us survive, and important survival activities like eating, drinking, sex, and even taking a breath of fresh air are accompanied by feel-good sensations that ensure we will do them again and again. (On the flip side, pain signals deter us from taking actions harmful to survival: like touching a hot stove or letting sharks eat our legs).

When certain foods are restricted, however, rebelliously eating these foods can bring extreme pleasure sensations. These sensations have been compared to addiction, but food in itself is not addictive. Even though popular (diet) culture demonizes highly palatable foods like sugar, studies have never shown food to change our brain chemistry in the way that drugs do. Eating these foods doesn’t necessitate dose increases over time or create physiological withdrawal. It just feels good to eat, and it feels better to eat things that taste good—nothing wrong with that!

But, when the eating experience is about more than the food itself, we can get hooked on the emotions that accompany eating. Trapped in a binge-restrict cycle, the sensations of freedom, naughtiness, or “last supper” permission can be absolutely intoxicating. In an overly scheduled and restricted life, it feels so good to rebel, even when those moments are immediately followed by reinforcing feelings of guilt. We learn to turn reflexively towards “forbidden foods” for hits of feel good when we feel bad for any reason.

Fortunately or unfortunately, this pattern begins to crumble under unconditional permission to eat all foods. If we can eat anything we want, and there are no bad foods (or good foods), there are no rules to break, no reason that any food choice represents revolt. We will hopefully still feel pleasure with eating, sometimes more cumulative pleasure, but diffuse, less stimulating, less precious. This is the magic of habituation. When we can count on dessert after dinner every night, we might take it or leave it if we don’t feel hungry, secure in knowing there is more tomorrow. When nothing stops us from eating a bowl of cheesy mashed potatoes for lunch, it becomes less imperative to sneak one at midnight. And when we are allowed to eat candy just because we have a taste for candy, how can this same substance represent ultimate insurrection on a day when we feel trapped?

Habituation affords us the calm to listen more clearly to our body signals like hunger and fullness, but it also has the sad side effect of neutralizing the gratification of forbidden food eating. And this is hard. This is a big loss to grieve, because in this place of balance, we might not get to experience the same dramatic swings in our emotional landscape. There is less pain, but also less intense pleasure. How do we cope with our anger, our melancholy, our boredom and our overwhelm, if food no longer brings bliss?

It takes time to understand the shape of this new hole in the topography of our pleasure. Pleasure is necessary, and good, and moments of intense pleasure can indeed be helpful to distract from distress when our tolerance fades. But if it can’t be found in food in the same way anymore, it becomes important for us to discover new sources of pleasure big and small. Perhaps we can find other ways to rebel against tasks, expectations, or society’s rules. Body inclusivity, after all, is a form of revolution. Perhaps we can look for healthy ways to offer ourselves more exciting stimulation: I bet many of us could use a little more sex and roller coasters in our lives! But perhaps it is also important to settle into the reality of small pleasure; the idea that maybe homeostasis, as distressing or unnatural as it might feel at first, has deep value. After all, supernovas of ecstasy have a way of blinding us to the softer satisfactions beneath: the colors in the sky, the warmth on our skin, the sensation of wind in our hair. As we grieve the loss of our food fantasies, the small pleasures of taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound available all around can carry us through until we discover our next chance for revolution.

that arises as we heal our relationship to food, and this one is tough. This is the more obvious grief of medical food restrictions. The grief of knowing that some foods truly are dangerous, that even though we want all foods to fit in our diet, they just don’t.

In my case, this is the grief of a celiac disease diagnosis. My body produces a physically damaging intestinal immune reaction in response to eating gluten-containing foods in any quantity. This scary truth, so much more immediate and objectively verifiable than vague concerns about long-term health impacts of consuming “unhealthy” foods, has been one of the hardest parts of my own intuitive eating journey. People with other life-threatening food allergies likely understand. On the one hand, I want to offer myself the peace of full permission to eat anything I want, and on the other hand, I don’t want to hurt my body. To decide: “I have full permission to eat anything I want…except gluten,” doesn’t feel permissive. It feels infuriating.

When I first considered the frustration of creating a “partial-permission” eating structure for myself, I was subsumed with black and white thinking. What was the “right” answer?  Should I eat a food that was a poison to my body, just to feel free, or give up on permission at all? Wouldn’t the existence of gluten-containing foods in themselves create a sense of scarcity that would leave me in constant rebellion, a “forbidden food” fear always lurking at the edges of my subconscious? I felt resentful of people without food allergies. I realized we don’t start our intuitive eating journeys on a level playing field.

But one day, I practiced switching into full self-compassion. Of course this was hard! Of course it wasn’t fair, who said life was? How sad for me that I was carrying a bigger burden than other people. How very very sad! I gave myself a big internal hug. I felt my feelings. I took a breath, and thought, “NONE of this is your fault.” I didn’t choose to have an autoimmune disease, or childhood stressors that activated that genetic code. I certainly didn’t create this world of toxic nutritionism, in which every food we eat is already policed from the start. I envisioned my child self, had I been given permission to eat what I wanted from the beginning, and I apologized that she was never able to experience absolute full permission—to never, even momentarily, have started in a safe place.

And I realized something huge. I could eat gluten-containing foods if I wanted to. The rule that made these foods “forbidden” (such a charged, puritanical word) also decreed that I was a bad person for choosing to eat them. It was a damaging dynamic from diet culture: a moral hierarchy overlaid on eating choices where it didn’t belong. No one should have to carry shame as an additional burden on top of stomach cramps: if I did eat gluten, I deserved to be soothed—held and comforted as I tried to survive the pain.

The truth was, instead of carrying around guilt for even thinking about taking a bite of something gluten-containing, I should free myself to choose each time. There was no morally right or wrong choice. It wasn’t my fault that I was born with an autoimmune disease in a world of gluten, and I certainly wasn’t a bad person for wanting to eat the same foods as the rest of the species. If I did choose to eat gluten and suffered physical pain, perhaps there were bigger happiness (mental health vs: physical health) questions in play. It is a complicated situation, one that none of us are prepared to navigate perfectly. We are always trying to maximize our happiness at any moment, and sometimes a sense of belonging, or fulfillment, or joy, can take precedence over the pains of the physical body.

I decided to give myself grace for the messiness of navigating a gluten-filled world in the vulnerable body I was given. I could, in fact, have full permission with food. Full permission to choose mental over physical happiness if this was what I needed, full permission to feel pain or experience disease or damage. This is the amazing agency afforded us as human beings. I shifted my thought patterns: from “I can’t have gluten,” to the more nuanced “I can have gluten, which will cause me physical suffering, and if I do choose this, it is because I have important reasons; I am not a bad person, and I will be there to comfort myself through the pain. I can also not have gluten if I choose to avoid the pain, and I will be there to comfort myself through the sadness of missing out.” I had choices now, and no matter what, I deserved compassion.

Once the distraction of guilt and morality was removed, I found grief lay underneath. Lots and lots of grief. Grief that gluten was a poison to my body at all, that I was different from other people. Grief that non-gluten choices weren’t always available and that I might experience scarcity or want. Grief that I had a more complicated journey ahead of me to feel safe and relaxed around food. I noticed all the stages of grief play out: denial that this was really happening, anger that it wasn’t fair, bargaining that couldn’t I just eat a little bit of gluten and be ok? I felt depression for the narrowing of my choices and expected life experiences. Eventually, though, I felt acceptance: celiac disease was a part of my genetics, my heritage. It connected me to others with celiac disease in my family and gave me a new perspective on resilience. It afforded me the empathy to be the practitioner I am today. The otherness and brokenness of having a chronic disease would always be a sadness for me to carry, but I could temper this sadness by giving myself a life filled with personalized gluten-free food adventures.

I haven’t tried “just one bite” of a gluten-containing cookie or sip of my husband’s beer in a very long time. These occurrences used to be weekly. Unsurprisingly, about 70% of people in studies with celiac disease report having gluten in their diet occasionally. It is just really hard. But once I gave myself permission to let go of guilt and move into grief, I realized that those momentary gluten rebellions didn’t seem to matter as much anymore. Sometimes we jump toward danger because we aren’t sure if anyone will catch us, because we are testing the security of waiting arms. When we can trust that a loving, non-judgmental inner parent is always there, however, ready to soothe and hold us, we have less motivation to fall on purpose.

Like so many sources of grief in our lives, the grief of a changing relationship with food can be borne so much easier when it is seen, when we don’t need to scream at the universe for acknowledgement.  The most important lesson grief has to teach us is that it is ok to be sad, and ok to suffer, even if it is (always) messy. As we navigate this complexity, there are no right and wrong answers: we get to decide what we think we need each moment, even if this is a nibble of harmful gluten, even if this is an uncomfortable binge. In the next moment, and the next, and for every moment after, we get to experiment anew.