I stopped calling meals cheating

For a long time I labeled any meal that felt large or indulgent as cheating. A big breakfast was cheating. Dessert was cheating. Second helpings were cheating. I said it casually, the way people often do, and I never asked what I was cheating on.

There was no diet. My goal was to gain weight on purpose. The meals I kept calling cheating were the ones helping me gain. I had taken a dieting word and applied it to my plate even though I was not dieting.

What happened when I dropped the word

Once I noticed the contradiction, I could not ignore it. Every time I called a second helping cheating, I was telling myself that something I needed to do was wrong. Part of me believed it. Repeating a word like that at every meal had an effect.

So I stopped using it. That was the whole change. I did not replace it with a kinder word or an affirmation. I just quit saying it out loud and in my head as well as I could, which at first was not very well.

It changed my reaction to the food. I cannot fully explain why. The breakfast was the same breakfast. Without that word, the meal no longer arrived with a judgment. It was food I needed for the goal I already had.

I am still a little surprised by how much one word affected me. I expected the hard parts of gaining to be the eating itself, and some days they are. Part of the struggle was an old dieting label, and that part I could drop.