How to challenge fear foods in eating disorder recovery
Challenging fear foods is one of the hardest things about eating disorder recovery. A fear food is any food that someone is afraid to eat because of certain negative feelings about the food, usually because of its nutritional content. For example, someone struggling with an eating disorder or disordered eating might fear a piece of cake because it is “too high in calories” or has “too much sugar.”
Based on my personal experience, I want to provide you with a plan for challenging fear foods:
Challenge Fear Foods Step #1: Write down all of your fear foods.
Categorize your fear foods into 3 buckets: 1) scariest fear foods, 2) middle-scary fear foods, and 3) least scary fear foods.
I also love an idea I read that said you can also write down why you fear the food, and then write something positive about the food after.
Here is an example of a fear foods list following the step above (note that it’s completely fine if yours is a lot longer!):
1) cake, cookies, fried foods, burger buns, chicken nuggets, bagels
2) peanut butter, mac n cheese, bread, pancakes, candy
3) banana, cereal, hot chocolate, potatoes, rice, latte, donut
Challenge Fear Foods Step #2 - Try 1 fear food per week.
Commit to trying 1 fear food at least one time per week, starting with the least scary fear foods. Of course, you can do more than 1 fear food per week. Whatever is doable for you!
Example of a week of fear foods:
Monday: banana
Tuesday: no fear food
Wednesday: potatoes
Thursday: no fear food
Friday: donut
Saturday: latte
Sunday: no fear food
Challenge Fear Foods Step #3: Work your way up to challenging your most scary fear foods.
You get to decide what fear foods you challenge. I challenged my least scary fear foods over and over in my eating disorder recovery until I became more comfortable with them. For example, during the early stage of my eating disorder recovery, I regularly had a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast.
Once I felt more comfortable with my least scary fear foods, I moved on to medium-scary fear foods, and finally the scariest fear foods. You can go in whatever order you prefer!
Challenge Fear Foods Step #4: Keep challenging fear foods over and over.
The only way for fear foods not to be scary anymore is to keep challenging them. When I had a bagel for the first time, it was so scary, but after having bagels for breakfast consistently, eating my previous fear food of a bagel got A LOT easier.
I got to the point where I was having fear foods daily, and even multiple times a day! I realized that a lot of the foods I feared were not actually scary and that I enjoyed them.
I am now at the point in my eating disorder recovery where I don’t have any fear foods. I think it’s because I’ve tried every single fear food I’ve had, and nothing bad happened because no food can change your body.
Remember, the eating disorder is DISORDERED. It wants us to believe something crazy will happen when we eat fear foods, but it won’t!
I hope this is encouraging and helpful for you in your eating disorder recovery journey.
Sending you so much love!
xx tori
Other blogs on challenging fear foods:
“Overcoming Fear Foods in Eating Disorder Recovery” by Lucy Walton
“How to Overcome Fear Foods in Eating Disorder Recovery” by Britt Richardson
“I Followed These Steps to Face My Fear Foods and You Can Too” by Ivy Souter
I was doing some digging, and I also found a great printable resource that you can use as you face your fear foods. :)