Challenging Fear Foods In Eating Disorder Recovery

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Last updated on October 19th, 2024 at 03:08 am

What Is A Fear Food?

Fear foods are the foods a person experiences extreme fear, anxiety, shame, or guilt around eating.

You will know a food is a fear food for you if:

• You feel you cannot keep the food in your home
• Stress or anxiety begins to build when you think about the food becoming available (for example 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 get rid of the food from your body through exercise or purging after you eat it

Which foods become fear foods vary from person to person depending on their culture, gender, socioeconomic status, and so much more.

Most fear foods come from the desire to restrict food to change body weight, shape, or size. Media messages that label certain food or foods as being healthy or unhealthy are a gateway to food aversion.

Even weight stigma in healthcare can trigger developing anxiety around certain foods.

Let’s dig into exactly where fear foods come from, how to challenge a fear food, and ultimately how to create peace with food.

Is It Normal To Have Fear Foods?

No.

Fear of foods are NOT normal. Fearing certain types of food is learned through living in diet culture and fatphobia.

Having a long list of fear foods can cause social isolation, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

None of us were born with a list of good and bad foods engrained into our brains. In fact, all of us were born intuitive eaters, with an innate ability to allow our bodies to dictate when we were hungry and which foods were necessary for appropriate nourishment.

Fear of specific foods comes from:

• Food rules from diet culture
• Distorted body image or body dysmorphia and a fear food will change the body
• Previous experiences feeling out of control with food or having a binge restrict cycle
• The belief that certain foods will lead to chronic disease
• Being pressured to clean eat
• Messages from healthcare that claim certain foods are bad for your health
• Pressure from parents to avoid certain foods (think dinner before dessert or holiday traditions like switch witch)

If you have a medical allergy to or clinical condition that causes a harmful reaction in the body in response to certain foods, this is not a fear food. It is normal and necessary to avoid foods under these circumstances.

What Are Some Common Fear Foods?

Common fear foods include: 

• Cakes, cookies, candies
• Foods with many ingredients (lasagna, sandwiches, pizza)
• Foods high in fat (Burgers, cakes, avocado, pizza)
• Pasta
• Bananas
• Foods eaten while dining out
• Protein-rich foods (especially for those who have adopted some element of a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle)

Foods that cause fear will be different for everyone. This list will likely change from decade to decade as fad diets change and we get new messages from the media.

Challenging Your Fear Foods

Write Down Food Rules

When you have fear foods, most of the time it’s hard to put into words exactly why certain foods sound scary. The key to challenging foods that feel scary is knowing what foods are scary and why.

Pro tip: write down your food rules! Any time you find yourself thinking “this food is good, bad, healthy, unhealthy or should only be eaten in moderation,” these are good cues that this is probably a food rule!

Food rules might look like:

• Lower-calorie foods are okay
• I must eat clean
• I can’t keep peanut butter in the house
• I can only eat brownies if I run for an hour afterward
• I can only have potatoes once a week

Identifying and writing down food rules takes away their power, and lets you choose whether you want to accept or challenge the rule. It gives the rule a voice of its own instead of having them be part of our identity.

Create A Fear Food Challenge List

To challenge a fear food, you need to know what we’re afraid of and what we’re not. You also want to know which food is scary and which food is “scariest.” In order to do this, create a fear foods challenge list.

Steps for creating a fear food challenge list:

1. Label a chart 1-100
2. Start at the bottom of the list (the number 1) These should be foods that cause no or very little anxiety.
3. Work your way up the list with foods that cause more or less anxiety. For example a food at 20 is one that would cause more anxiety than a food at 10 but less than a food at 50.

Your food challenge list will help you to know what order to challenge foods in. Starting with foods that feel too scary can lead to overwhelm, panic and anxiety.

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

Steps to Challenge A Fear Food

1. Start with a food on your challenge list that causes a low level of anxiety. Do not to start off with the fear food that cause the highest anxiety (near level 100)
2. Introduce a new fear food 1 time per week to start.
3. After several weeks, gradually increase fear food challenges to 3-4x per week. Work your way up the fear foods chart from 1-100 (least to most feared).

Best Tools For Fear Food Exposure

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:

1. Make breakfast bakes with fruit and oats. 
2. Make breakfast with fruit, oats, and maple syrup or brown sugar
3. 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:

• 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 is a great tool to use for those foods that feel the scariest. It involves exposing yourself to the food in different way over a series of time.

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.

Fear Food Challenge Tips

Challenge The Eating Disorder Voice

When you start to challenge fear foods, the nasty narrative inside your head is going to get LOUD! The itty bitty shitty committee inside your head is known as the eating disorder voice.

If you have an eating disorder, the eating disorder will do anything to try to survive! 

Remember that because of the eating disorder voice:

• Foods on the hierarchy may change as you progress in recovery. 
• Safe foods can easily become fear foods
• The more challenging foods you add into our diet, the louder our eating disorder will likely get
• Your eating disorder will try to talk you into only eating fear foods in certain amounts
• Your eating disorder will encourage you to only eat fear foods under certain conditions (e.g. at a birthday party).
• Your eating disorder will attempt to change the eating disorder recovery meal plan as a negotiating tool for the fear food being consumed

Get Meal Support

You probably won’t be able to effectively challenge fear foods on your own. This is because your eating disorder will constantly be trying to change the rules and negotiate in order to keep itself alive. Getting meal support is the best way to help you feel safe and progress during fear food challenges.

Eating fear foods can also elicit 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.

As you challenge a certain food, it may also be helpful to have a mantra you state along with eating the food. Here are some good examples:

• 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.

If you are struggling with finding the motivation to continue to heal your relationship with food check out these eating disorder recovery quotes.

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