Hello, I'm Kate Freeman, and this is The Daily Dollip. Transform your eating habits and achieve long-term wellbeing with Ayla Health. Ayla Health is a mobile app that combines micro-learning with meal planning into a seamless user experience that teaches you how to eat well for the rest of your life, one habit at a time. Download it now from the App Store.
It's free! On this episode of The Daily Dollip, I'm turning about black and white, thinking particularly when it comes to nutrition and how it's impacting your long-term health. It's dollop time. Hey, hey, my name's Kate.
I'm a registered nutritionist, and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, I'm tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start. And so, I'm changing the conversation. You deserve to feel confident in your food choices and empower to maximize your health. Every weekday will dollop an episode into your feed, covering everything from busting nutrition myths, practical food ideas, my thoughts on trending topics, and habits for a healthy life.
My promise to you, it will always be sustainable, realistic, restriction-free, and strictly no-woo. Only good science translated into easy, everyday advice. Let's do this. Hey, hey, welcome back to The Daily Dollip podcast.
Today, we are diving into something that affects so many of us on our nutrition journey. And it affects us particularly when it comes to making changes to our nutrition. And in fact, it's used a lot in a number of areas of our health and lifestyle. And it's this sneaky little habit that can derail us and it does all the time, and it is black and white thinking.
So, you know the drill. This is the all-or-nothing mindset where food is either good or bad, where you either stick to a diet or you've ruined it and you give up entirely. If you've ever thought, well, I ate one cookie, so I may as well eat the whole box or I've broken the diet, so I may as well eat everything that I've been restricting all week, then this episode is definitely for you. And I just want you to know that you are absolutely not alone in this feeling because it is extraordinarily common.
We'll explore how black and white thinking impacts your relationship with food, why it's so common, and how you can break free from this mindset to build a healthier, more sustainable approach to eating. Okay, so let's start by defining what we mean by black and white thinking. So, this term refers to a cognitive pattern where you see things in extremes, either all good or all bad, with no room for grey areas. And in the context of food and nutrition, it's like labeling foods as either healthy or unhealthy or clean or junk or allowed or forbidden, good, bad.
And it's that voice in your head that says, you can't eat the cookie, it's bad for you, or I've already messed up today, so I may as well keep going and eat everything I want. These kinds of thinking traps are black and white thinking. So, let's be really clear though, this isn't just a quirky mental habit that we have, it actually has real consequences on our relationship with food, our health and our long-term mental wellbeing. So, why does it show up in the first place?
So, black and white thinking often arises from our desire for control. You know, we're told to be disciplined, to make healthy choices, to avoid bad foods, right, and there's so much pressure either from GPs or health professionals, you know, for doing particular things for our health, social media, marketing, our culture puts enormous amount of pressure on looking a certain way for health and having the right body size. But the problem is, is that food is actually complex, health is complex, there's no one size fits all, no one food is purely good or bad, it's all about balance and context. So, for example, we can talk about the classic sugar is evil mentality, which is very typical black and white thinking.
And if you've ever thought sugar is bad for you, you're not alone, it's spouted all over the internet, you know, many have had, or book has been sold on this. But the truth is sugar in moderation is totally fine for people, it's the overconsumption, the lack of balance and the overall dietary pattern that matters, not the one cooking at the party. So, black and white thinking essentially doesn't leave any room for this nuance, and it doesn't allow for flexibility, which can then lead to unnecessary guilt, which we've talked about in a previous episode, frustrations and feelings of failure. And we can actually go through so many different elements of nutrition, we look at sugar, right, which is a macronutrient, but we can look at broccoli, which is typically, with black and white thinking, we class that as a healthy food.
But if you just built your diet out of broccoli, that would actually be a very unhealthy dietary pattern, not enough protein, not enough energy, missing a few key vitamins and minerals. You'd have lots of some vitamins and minerals, but you'd be lacking in a bunch of things. So, we can't build our whole diet out of broccoli. The same goes for so many different foods.
It's our overall dietary pattern that matters more than the individual foods and the nutrients. And that's so important, and black and white thinking can't encapsulate that level of complexity and nuances with the way that we're eating. So, what are the consequences of black and white thinking? Well, it's essentially a really rigid mindset.
And so, essentially, you know, there's an impact on your mental and emotional health. Because when you view food through this good and bad lens, every meal becomes a judgment space. So, this can create a lot of guilt around food, make eating feel like a moral decision, instead of just something that's providing you fuel and nourishment and enjoyment. Over time, that can lead to an unhealthy relationship with food, which we talked about in a previous episode, and contribute to behaviors like binge eating, restrictive dieting, disordered eating, and all the things that really rob us of the joy of food and the parts of eating that bring us the most pleasure.
And in fact, studies show that black and white thinking is strongly linked to eating disorders and other negative eating behaviors. It's like a cycle, again, which we've talked about. So, you cheat on your diet, you feel guilty, you restrict yourself, you then binge again because you feel bad about yourself, and it's this exhausting, horrid cycle that we can find ourselves really, really stuck in. And it just doesn't work for us long-term to think about food in this way.
And the great thing is that you don't have to live this way. You can break free from black and white thinking, and that's exactly what I want to take you through now. So, I've got a bunch of tips to help break out of this all-on-nothing mentality and shift you towards a more healthy, more flexible approach to eating. And before I get into those tips, the two things that you really must have is the ability to practice self-compassion and be kind to yourself.
You won't be able to do these tips without those two things. So, tip number one is start with awareness. You can't change what you're not aware of. So, the first step in breaking free is recognizing when black and white thinking shows up.
Are you labeling your foods as good and bad? Are you feeling guilty about something that's outside, you know, what's healthy or your diet? Or, you know, is food making you have this emotional response? Once you catch these thoughts, just jot them down.
And then if you can, you can take the next step, which is challenge them. Ask yourself, is this really true? Can I see this food in a different way? Tip number two is reframing your mindset.
So, instead of thinking as foods as good and bad, you want to try and focus more on the balance. Ask yourself, how can I make this meal more nourishing, more satisfying, more enjoyable? When you think of a food as something that nourishes your body, rather than something that's permitted or forbidden, it can change the approach that you're taking towards food. Tip number three is embrace the add-in mindset.
So, this is one of my favorites. I've always loved approaching nutrition from this perspective because when we're bombarded with advice that's like, cut out sugar or stop eating carbs or we need to not eat junk food or ultra processed foods are terrible for your health, these are all negative things. These are all things to not do, which is all well and good and forms part of the nutritional picture of health, but they don't actually tell us what to do. And I've met so many people over the years, particularly with the quick sugar craze, in particular, who came into office and they're like, I've stopped eating sugar.
But they don't know what to eat. They're confused about what to focus on, and then they've focused so much on sugar that they've discovered that capsicum contain sugar and yogurt contains sugar and all these perfectly healthy foods contain sugar as well. And so, it becomes this minefield of being not able to handle the nuances and the graze of nutrition because they're black and white mindset is that sugar is bad. So, the add-in mindset simply means focusing on including more nutritious whole foods into your diet, allowing for flexibility and enjoyment with your favorite foods.
So, stop trying to cut them out. Just focus on what else you can add in to them. So, have that slice of cake at a birthday party or have that bowl of ice cream after dinner. What else can you add to it?
What does dinner look like? What can other snacks and meals look like? Focus your efforts on putting a range of different foods into your diet because, again, it's the overall dietary pattern that matters more. Tip number four is practice mindful eating.
So, this means being fully present while eating, savoring your food, paying attention to how it makes you feel, noticing your hunger and fullness cues, noticing your energy levels, noticing your mood, noticing the taste of food, noticing your enjoyment level of food, noticing the texture of food. It's really immersing yourself in the experience of eating and paying full attention to that. Mindful eating can help break the cycle of overeating and feeling guilty about food. But the goal of mindful eating is not to eat less.
The goal of mindful eating is to give yourself enough space to tune in and listen to how that food is making you feel and then making a decision about whether you want to keep eating or not. Now, for a lot of people, that does result in them eating less. But if you go into mindful eating with the goal of, I'm trying to eat less, then you're missing the point. The goal of mindful eating is I'm trying to make decisions about whether I want to eat or not to eat and how I want to eat and how I don't want to eat based on fully immersing myself in the experience of eating and then being happy with those choices.
And then generally speaking from the evidence is that mindful eating has been shown to then help long-term with improving diet quality, you know, helping maintain a healthy weight that's right for us, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not the end goal and that's really, really important. Tip number five is seeking support. So if black and white thinking is something that you struggle with, don't be afraid to reach out for help.
You know, when it comes to psychology, black and white thinking is called a thinking trap, which is why I pop that in the title of my episode. It, you know, it trips us up in so many areas of our lives, not just our nutrition. And so talking to either a dietician, if it's food related or a psychologist, if it's psychology related for you, you know, who might specialize in this area of body image, food and eating behavior, they can help you navigate through these thought patterns and develop a more balanced approach to eating and a more flexible thinking pattern that is just more conducive to embracing the gray of life. So important to know that you are not alone in this and that you can actually create a more flexible way of thinking.
It's so important. Remember, eating is not about perfection. It is about nourishment and balance and joy. Life is full of gray areas.
It's lived in the gray, not the extremes. And by shifting away from black and white thinking, you'll build a healthier and more sustainable approach to nutrition that works for you in the long term. Well, that is it for today's episode of the daily dollop. If you found this helpful, we'd love it if you could share the dollop with a friend, maybe someone who might be stuck in an all or nothing mindset.
We'd also love if you could leave me a review. Let me know how you're finding this podcast and helping you. I would love to hear from you. Well, take care.
We'll catch you in the next episode. The Daily Dollop Podcast is proudly brought to you by Ayla Health. Build food confidence and learn how to choose foods that are right for you and your body. Download the app today and build habits that last.
As always, you can find out more about our chat in the show notes. You can also join the conversation over in the Ayla Health community group on Facebook. We'd love to see you there. If you've got a topic you'd love to hear us chat about on the Daily Dollop, please let us know.
Email us at hello at aylahealth.com.au or you can send us a message on Instagram. Until next time.