Why You Can’t Stick to Healthy Eating

Imagine a typical Saturday barbecue with friends. You show up hungry and feel the pull towards the grilled sausages and ribs, dripping with flavor and tradition. At the same time, a little voice in your head reminds you of your commitment to eat better.

A part of you wants flavorful grilled meats, and another part of you understands the health impacts—an excess of saturated fats, calories, and sugary sauces can lead to poor health. Choosing a salad might better meet your nutritional goals, but it can feel like a personal loss at the cost of social enjoyment and satisfaction.

This tension isn’t just about choosing between “healthy” and “unhealthy” foods; it’s about following through on the promise you made to yourself. It’s about reconciling your need for health with your desire for enjoyment. It’s about not feeling alienated from friends and not having to explain or justify your food choices. And ultimately, it’s about taking personal responsibility for your body—if you don’t take care of yourself, no one else will do it for you.

The Deeper Eating Challenge

Having worked with hundreds of clients to improve their eating habits, I found one common thread in the quest to eat better:

There is an abundance of delicious things to eat and a shortage of awareness as to why and how we eat them.

This lack of awareness shows up as that subtle yet familiar tension—that push and pull at the barbecue. At best, we hold these tensions clumsily, justifying our eating, no matter how it impacts our health or well-being.

Sometimes, we prioritize health in the morning and let our late-night cravings lead us to hedonism at night. Other times, we may split the difference and eat a salad with our burger instead of French fries.

At worst, we let these tensions tear us apart: We feel disappointed by not living up to our aspirations to eat better, ashamed by making the same “mistake” again and again, and distressed by falling into patterns of bingeing or disordered eating.

Clearly, we need a better approach that doesn’t result in haphazard eating or being jerked around by our impulses, caught in a Sisyphean struggle to make good choices.

Thankfully, a better approach to eating does exist, and starts with a radical premise:

Stop trying to make these tensions go away.

Instead, be present for these inner struggles around food. They are not problems to be solved but polarities to be managed. In fact, they all contain important truths about your eating.

Embracing the Tension: An Integrative Approach to Eating

Imagine yourself back at the barbeque, and the host brings out a giant cake to celebrate. It’s your favorite flavor, and seeing it makes you drool.

Instead of making an impulsive decision that you later regret, you pause and consider three things: How am I about to manage my biological, psychological, and social realities?

Biological Reality: Certain eating patterns—an excess of refined sugars and fats combined with a lack of fiber and phytochemicals—can promote cancer, diabetes, and metabolic disorders. No single meal causes disease. However, months and years of eating certain foods in excess will inevitably worsen health.

Psychological Reality: Cake is delicious. Cravings are real. The feeling of positive emotions is only a bite away. Plus, it’s a celebratory moment, so why not? At the same time, what might other people think? Will I feel awkward withholding from cake if others are eating? Am I afraid of being judged by others?

Sociocultural Reality: Within a fatphobic culture, the more you deviate from the thin ideal, the more stigma and discrimination you will face. Gaining weight is seen as a personal failure to manage the abundance of highly palatable, convenient foods. Cake is labeled as “fattening”; therefore, it is unacceptable if you’re overweight or trying to lose weight. You feel pressured to conform to dominant narratives around health, beauty, and clean eating, whether you agree with them or not.

The wisdom to eat well begins by acknowledging and accepting all these truths, no matter how hard they are to swallow.

For instance, if you decide you want to eat cake, are you doing so because you recognize a genuine desire to experience the flavor? Or are you being driven by the need to fit in and not feel awkward?

If you decide not to eat cake, are you doing so because you genuinely worry about its effect on your blood sugar? Or are you afraid of getting fat and feeling inadequate compared to some idealized social norm?

There is no “right” answer. All of the above might be true.

In fact, all of the above are likely true—and that’s the point!

When you start to notice and name these tensions without trying to dispel them away, you can start to regain your power as an eater.

Naming the tensions you feel requires being honest with yourself. You must slow down and become curious about the subjective and objective truths you face.

Ultimately, you are not making a choice about cake. You are practicing a new way of being with yourself around food—a way of managing your biological, psychological, and sociocultural realities as skillfully as possible.

The best part is that this approach isn’t limited to cake or barbecue. You can practice consciously naming and managing these polarities at every meal.

Naming, Claiming, and Taking Responsibility

Most diets fail because they fight with some aspect of reality. They pretend your appetite isn’t governed by emotions or that sociocultural pressures to eat and look a certain way aren’t important. All of these things matter when it comes to feeding yourself, and until you can hold the complexity of these different perspectives, you’ll never be able to rise above them.

It is important to note that just because these dimensions are real doesn’t make them right. Fatphobic beliefs are not just. Our current diet-entrenched culture discriminates against people with larger bodies. I believe we need to continually fight for justice and equity for all body sizes and shapes; however, we cannot throw out the baby with the bathwater and pretend that the ways we eat don’t matter.

Once you are honest with yourself about the reasons you eat and the tensions you feel, this self-knowledge becomes data to work with, not directives that jerk you around. Accepting that tensions to eat certain ways will always be present allows you to take responsibility for what you put into your mouth without engaging in self-deception or magical thinking.