Table of Contents
Last updated on August 26th, 2025 at 12:47 am
Challenging fear foods is one of the most important, and often most intimidating, steps in eating disorder recovery. Fear foods are those items that have become wrapped up in anxiety, guilt, or rigid rules, making them feel “off limits” or dangerous to eat. Facing these foods head-on isn’t just about eating what you’ve avoided it’s about reclaiming freedom, flexibility, and trust in your body. Each time you challenge a fear food, you take back a part of your identity.
Every time you choose to eat a food your eating disorder voice tells you is off limits you reclaim a little more of your identity from the eating disorder. You weaken the power the eating disorder holds over you and strengthen your confidence in recovery. While the process can feel uncomfortable at first, it is also deeply rewarding and helps rebuild a balanced, peaceful relationship with food.
This article explores what a fear food is, how to create a food challenge list to isolate which foods feel scary to you and why, and practical tips to get rid of fear foods for good.
What Is A Fear Food
Fear foods are the foods a person experiences extreme fear, anxiety, shame, or guilt around eating. The fear isn’t about the food itself, it’s about the beliefs attached to it
You will know a food is a fear food for you if:
- You refuse to keep the food in your house
- You get anxious if you think about going out to eat
- You start to avoid social situations where a food that causes anxiety might be available
- You create rules about how much, when, and how frequently you can have a food you are afraid of
- You experience extreme shame, guilt, or feel the need to purge the food if you eat it
- You compulsively exercise to earn certain foods or compensate for them
Is It Normal To Have Fear Foods
Yes.
Having fear foods is a very common part of living with or recovering from an eating disorder. Even for people experience food guilt simply from living in diet culture or experiencing fatphobia. Many people develop strong rules or beliefs around certain foods, often labeling them as “bad,” “unsafe,” or “off limits.” Over time, these rules can become so rigid that even the thought of eating those foods brings up anxiety, guilt, or shame. This happens because eating disorders thrive on control and restriction, and fear foods become a way for the disorder to maintain power.
When I was in my recovery from an eating disorder, it was easy to think that some foods would never feel peaceful. But the good news is that fear foods don’t have to stay scary forever. With support and gradual exposure, you can learn to reintroduce these foods into your life and prove to yourself that they’re not dangerous. In fact, challenging fear foods is a key step in healing your relationship with eating and moving toward food freedom.
Why Do I Have Fear Foods
You may have fear foods because eating disorders often attach rigid rules, fears, and moral judgments to food. Over time, certain foods get labeled as “good or bad,” “unsafe,” “unclean,”or “off-limits,” and eating them starts to feel threatening. This fear can come from many places, diet culture messages that glorify “healthy” eating and demonize other foods, past experiences of restriction or bingeing, or using food rules as a way to cope with stress, emotions, or a sense of control. Because you have made certain foods off limits in the past, this may intensify these fear foods because you might feel like you’ll never stop eating the food if you start and thus restrict the food.
When your brain has been conditioned to believe that certain foods are dangerous, it makes sense that eating them would trigger anxiety. But the truth is that no single food has the power to define your health, your worth, or your recovery. This is a lie your eating disorder voice tells you to keep you complacent in following its demands. Fear foods exist because of the disorder’s influence, not because the food itself is harmful.
What Are Some Common Fear Foods
Common fear foods in eating disorder recovery often include items that diet culture labels as “unhealthy,” “fattening,” or “off-limits.” While everyone’s list can look different.
here are some common foods foods you might find yourself restricting:
- Carbohydrates: bread, pasta, rice, bagels, cereal, pizza
- Fats: butter, cheese, avocado, oils, peanut butter, fried foods
- Sweets and desserts: cake, cookies, ice cream, chocolate, candy
- Snack foods: chips, crackers, popcorn
- Fast food or takeout: burgers, fries, fried chicken, tacos
- Processed or packaged foods: frozen meals, snack bars, “junk food”
- Beverages: sugary drinks, milkshakes, specialty coffee drinks
How To Create A Fear Foods List
To challenge a fear food, you need to know what you’re afraid of and what you’re not. You also want to know which foods are the “scariest” to help you reduce anxiety when you’re putting these foods back into your diet. In order to do this, create a fear foods challenge list. Label a chart 1-100. Start at the bottom of the list (the number 1). These should be foods that cause no or very little anxiety. Work your way up the list with foods that cause more or less anxiety. Once you have created your list, challenge each fear food one at a time 3-4 times per week.
Fear Foods Challenge List Example:
- 100-cake
- 100-beef
- 85-snickers bar
- 85-pasta
- 80-soda
- 70-tacos
- 70-cookies
- 70-french fries
- 65-tuna sandwiches
- 65-sushi
- 50-restaurant salad
- 50-macaroni and cheese
- 45-potato chips
- 40- Starbucks latte
- 40-chicken strips
- 35-bacon
- 25-bananas
- 10-broccoli
- 10-carrots
- 10-chicken breast
- 10-diet soda
- 10-cereal
- 10-yogurt
- 5-carrots
5 Tools To Challenge Your Fear Foods
Food Chaining: Safe Foods To Fear Food
Safe foods are foods that a person feels they can eat freely without anxiety, guilt, or shame. For many, safe foods tend to align with diet cultures list of “good or healthy” foods such as vegetables. Foods high on your fear food list can be combined with safe foods to reduce anxiety. Starting with safe food and adding in a fear food can be a powerful way to challenge the food causing you grief.
For example: You might have a safe food that is oatmeal and a fear food that is berry cobbler.
Try this to challenge the fear food listed above:
- Make breakfast bakes with fruit and oats.
- Make breakfast with fruit, oats, and maple syrup or brown sugar
- Make Berry Cobbler
You did it! Now give yourself a high five!
Visualization
Get yourself ready for the experience of what having a fear food will be like.Reduce fear food anxiety by mentally walking through what the experience will be like. Think of it similar to the visualization strategies used by athletes prior to a basketball game!
Practice visualization by asking yourself these questions about the food you will challenge:
- Where will I be?
- Who will I be with?
- What will I be wearing?
- What time will it be?
- Where will I buy the food?
- What will the food be?
- What does it taste like?
Use Exposure Therapy
Exposure therapy can be a powerful tool for challenging fear foods in eating disorder recovery because it helps you gradually retrain your brain’s response to those foods. When you avoid certain foods, your anxiety around them grows stronger. Try this tool for those foods highest on your list. Exposure therapy is a Small exposures over time can make a big difference.
Steps to food exposure include:
- Day 1: Pick challenge food. Example: Muffin
- Day 2: Practice sitting in a room with fresh baked muffins.
- Day 3: Put muffin onto a plate in front of you ONLY (you don’t need to eat it, notice: smells, colors, texture
- Day 4: Put muffin on a plate and put a bite onto a fork notice: smells, colors, textu
- Day 5: Put muffin onto your tongue (you don’t need to chew or swallow)
- Day 6: Take a full bite of muffin, chew, and swallow.
- Day 7: Eat the full muffin.
Get Meal Support
It will probably be difficult or impossible to challenge a fear food without someone pushing you to do so. This is because your eating disorder will constantly be trying to change the rules about what recovery actually means and convince you you that you can keep some of your eating disorder behaviors and still recover. Getting meal support is the best way to help you feel safe and effectively challenge fear foods.
Eating fear foods can also cause extreme guilt, shame, panic, anger or frustration. A support person can help you to sit with these emotions in while you are challenging scary foods and encourage you to continue on even when it feels impossible. A support person can be a parent, a spouse, a trusted friend, or a healthcare professional.
A support person can help you by:
- Initiating a schedule to challenge foods
- Preparing and plating the food
- Matching you bite for bite
- Helping to set the pace of how quickly the food should be eaten
Challenging fear foods can also cause the desire to engage in other eating disorder behaviors such as urges to purge or compulsively exercise. A support person can help you sit through these urges.
Use Positive Quotes or Mantras
Challenging a food that feels scary can be filled with sadness, grief, depression, or anger. You might even feel like you are losing part of your identity. Be kind to yourself on this difficult journey. When food noice is extremely loud of you just don’t know what to do next, having one or two empowering, actionable single line statements can put you into action to do the hard recovery things.
Good recovery mantra’s include:
- I deserve to be nourished
- There is nothing more powerful than my ability to have freedom with food
- My body is more valuable than my eating disorder voice
- I have the strength to deal with this
- No food holds moral or nutritional superiority over others.
© 2022 Peace and Nutrition
- I Wish I Had More Control With Food - November 18, 2025
- The Fattest Person in the Room - November 18, 2025
- 10 Tips To Cope With Bad Body Image Days - September 29, 2025