Food Fantasies

We all feel that at a deep emotional level that food is love. If we were lucky, our mothers breastfed us early in life. Our mothers warmly held us and looked at us lovingly while they nourished us. We knew that our parents and our grandparents loved us if they fed us ice cream, cookies, cake, and candy — and we suspected that they hated us if they forced us to eat our broccoli. We loved partying with our friends in high school and college, feasting on pizza and chips. And finally, when we started going out for romantic candlelit dinners with our future life partners, we might have gone for pasta followed by tiramisu and a cappuccino.

Why do we associate certain foods with love, comfort, intimacy, and emotional security, and other foods with deprivation? One simple reason is that certain foods taste better and are more filling. You taste something delicious, it brings a smile to your face, and you love the person who fed it to you. Some foods, like bread and butter, have that comforting stomach-feel that makes you feel satisfied, and you love the person that makes you feel well-fed and content. Since we associate food with love, there is an idea that we overeat when we feel unloved in order to feel less depressed.

There is a clear pattern when we look at the foods we associate with love and those that we don’t: All the foods we associate with love are high in carbohydrates and/or fat (i.e., ice cream, lasagna) and all the foods that we don’t love to eat are low in carbohydrates and/or fat (i.e., broccoli, plain nonfat yogurt). Not surprisingly the high-carbohydrate/high-fat foods are the most fattening while the low-carbohydrate/low-fat foods are the least fattening. You won’t gain weight if you can eat the most fattening foods in moderation but if you can’t, you gain weight. It’s difficult to stick to a diet because it usually means eating a lot more of the foods you least love to eat (i.e. broccoli) and a lot less of the foods you most love to eat (pizza). What do we do, eat what we love and gain weight or eat what we hate and lose weight?

Harm Reduction or Abstinence?

There are two approaches to dieting: harm reduction and abstinence. Harm reduction is a damage control strategy. You learn how to eat fattening foods in moderation. That’s the Weight Watchers approach. The more fattening the food, the more points it is assigned, and you can only accumulate so many points per day. Eating the highest point foods is a highly pleasurable activity that you do to relieve stress as well as celebrate with and feel closer to friends and lovers. Life seems empty to give up such sublime oral pleasures completely. Many people will succeed with harm reduction. But what if your off switch seems to be broken and after years, if not decades, you just can’t learn to eat your favorite fattening foods in moderation, despite your most heroic efforts? Then you might have to give abstinence a try. The Keto and Paleo diets are both based on abstinence from all added sugar and highly processed foods. Keto radically eliminates most carbohydrates as you fill up on high-fat foods like steak, while the Paleo diet allows for filling up on fresh fruits and vegetables as well as lean sources of protein like fish.

Research suggests that both low-fat and low-carb diets appear to work. But inevitably we crave the high-carb/high-fat foods we no longer eat and may suffer rebound effects as a consequence of the intensified craving. Nevertheless, over time the cravings may subside as we begin to lose the taste for foods we no longer eat. Over time the new way of eating is preferred as it feels healthy due to increased energy and improved gastrointestinal functioning.

Yet the cravings may never entirely go away. You still desire, fantasize, and dream about the pizza and ice cream you no longer eat. We are nostalgic for the good old days when we got to feast on fattening foods with our friends and lovers. So we are always on the lookout for some way to make a harm reduction approach work, so we don’t have to abstain from our favorite foods entirely for the rest of our adult lives. We are always in search of some way to rationalize getting off of our “rabbit food” diet (i.e., lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, and low-fat sources of protein) and eat more of what we like best — the tastiest, most-filling foods like bread, pasta, steak, and mashed potatoes topped off with something sweet for dessert. We are still like children who don’t want to eat their broccoli and just skip to dessert.

What is a food fantasy?

When we are hungry, we begin thinking about food and what we would like to eat. That’s a food fantasy and we almost always fantasize about eating something that is a real taste treat (i.e., a fattening food). If we go to bed hungry, we are likely to dream about food and it’s always a fattening food — something really satisfying like a bacon cheeseburger. For the most part, we don’t fantasize about eating celery sticks, apples, and canned tuna in water (i.e., the least fattening foods). As a consequence, our thinking about food — our food beliefs — become distorted through wishful thinking. Our food fantasies motivate us to rationalize eating the most fattening foods because that’s what we dream about eating.

What makes a fantasy a fantasy is that in some way it’s unrealistic even if it contains a kernel of truth. Some food beliefs pander to wishful thinking: what we wish was true but isn’t actually true. The basic food fantasy is that I can eat my favorite fattening foods until I’m full and I won’t become overweight and then suffer the body image issues and health issues that overweight people suffer. A food fantasy is a form of denial. It denies the fact that if you’re overweight you might not be able to eat your favorite fattening food until you're full without gaining weight. If eating those foods in moderation has proved beyond you, you might need to learn to abstain from eating those foods on a daily basis. You might be able to take brief and infrequent vacations from the diet as a reward if you can do it without overeating and falling back into your old patterns. This isn’t exactly happy news, as we resent any diet that doesn’t allow us to have even a taste of our favorite fattening foods on a daily basis.

Abstinence and Self-compassion

The first step in adopting a more abstinence-based diet is to cultivate acceptance of the fact that you might need to learn to live with certain dietary restrictions for the rest of your life. If eating fattening foods in moderation is beyond us, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up as though we were failures but should cultivate self-compassion for our limitations. Fortunately, when you learn to love filling up on the least-fattening foods you won’t feel horribly deprived of the more fattening foods you no longer eat on a daily basis. Then it will be easy to feel good about yourself and your new eating habits. In addition, you might find yourself loving the people who feed you broccoli rather than the people who try to seduce you back into your old ways of eating. In healthy relationships, romantic partners demonstrate their love for you by supporting your self-care.