Why the guilt?

I don't think there any one clear cut answer. Sometimes I think ita because the vast majority of newer people on here are looking at being on a "diet". So if they eat that donut they are cheating at their diet, and it's natural to feel guilt when you cheat at something. Sometimes it's not fully having a grasp of how little damage overall that donut will do to you. Someone eats a whole bag of chips and sure it puts them over their goal, but how far over maintenance did they actually go if they shooting for a large deficit? They just wake up the next day and see the scale says they gained 10 pounds so they think one binge and it's over, not realizing that 10 pounds is 95% water from the sodium overload. So when you think that one mistake erased a whole month of work in the blink of an eye it gets you down.

I've just said a similar thing elsewhere, if I shovel a pie in my face i feel crappy for a little while I log it on here, swallow the last bite while the app flashes me about bad fats and carbs... then I close the app, think about maybe going for a run for a while and move on.
Don't do it often mind you, pies are real bad!

I'm going to guess part of it is because of all the "you control you" "only YOU determine ... " blah blah
The diet industry (including these forums) have set it up so that if they cheat or go over, they feel as if they have failed as a person and have no self control.
Instead of just having a bad day and moving on.

"Feeling guilty" is probably a poor expression due to the limit of language. Some even liken it to killing for comparison. However it's completely "legit" to feel bad for a failure and diet isn't a small endeavor.

kuranda10 wrote: »

I'm going to guess part of it is because of all the "you control you" "only YOU determine ... " blah blah
The diet industry (including these forums) have set it up so that if they cheat or go over, they feel as if they have failed as a person and have no self control.
Instead of just having a bad day and moving on.

If "you don't control you", you would not be watching calories and consumption. Fact is, when you screw up, you've lost control over your own plan and the answer for me isn't feeling guilty or even just walking away, the answer is spending a little time examining how I respond to stimulus and what I can do to change my response.

Francl27 wrote: »

I feel guilty because my willpower fails.

This. It's the dietary equivalent of the walk of shame.

I usually only feel guilt if I've REALLY gone overboard for several days in a row. Last night I logged my nice, low cal Subway sandwich I planned on eating which fit perfectly into my day. On the way there, I saw a Chipotle and my 450 sandwich turned into a 1000 calorie burrito. No regrets, it was totally worth it.

I don't really understand the guilt thing, either. I have experienced regret that I blew my calories on something that didn't even taste that good, or annoyance that I overate and thus will take longer to reach my goals, but food doesn't make me feel guilty.

There really isn't a big difference in regret and guilt. One is feeling bad about something you've done (regret) the other is feeling bad because you know or think you've done something wrong or bad (guilt)

I think it really is guilt for me. If I decide I'm going to have a high-calorie meal with wine and dessert and then go back to my low-calorie eating after that, I don't feel guilty at all and I enjoy it. But if I plan my healthy eating and end up sabotaging the plan on a whim, I feel guilty. I feel as though I've failed myself and my good intentions in that moment of weakness.

I don't let the guilt stick though. I move on, knowing there's nothing I can do about it but change my behaviour in the future. And the next time, I remember how bad I felt for failing myself, and I make a better choice. And it feels great.

Last night I had way too many beers, took an Uber through the Jack in the Box drive through and proceeded to eat $11.85 worth of fast food (equal to several thousand calories on top of the copious amounts of beer I had already had).

Woke up this morning to quite the scale increase as well as a feeling of guilt. I had to do some serious self talk to pull myself out of it, but I was able to realize it was nothing worth stressing over. So it's going to take me another week or two to hit my goal? Big deal. The Sourdough Jack was delicious.

ETA: If I go over my goals for the day by a few hundred calories because I decided to have a couple glasses of wine, I don't feel guilty. The feelings of guilt occur when I either over-indulge beyond what I see as "reasonable", or when I over-indulge out of impulse rather than choice (and often times these two go together). What bothers me the most when this happens isn't the extra calories or hindrance it'll have on my weight loss goals, it's the fact that it challenges the idea I have of myself as a healthy, active, in control person.

What Orphia said. Women especially are taught that there are "good" and "bad" foods and that dieting is a virtue and eating whatever you like is a sin. In my case, I don't know if it's actual guilt as much as a self-esteem issue: "You're weak and have no willpower, blah blah." Which of course gives me permission to stay on the downward slide. So now I'm trying to tell myself, "Boy, that's yummy, but is it worth cutting out an extra 400 calories tomorrow?" Sometimes it is, most of the time it isn't.