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As well as Jennifer Bowden’s columns in the NZ Listener, listener.co.nz subscribers can access her fortnightly Myth-buster column which explores food and nutrition myths. Here, she looks at whether you can have your cake and eat it too.
Have you ever noticed how some foods come with a wink and a nudge, as if they’re flirting with danger?
Take that rich, chocolate-flavoured New Zealand milk drink that proudly declares itself “a little bit naughty”. It’s a clever marketing trick – tapping into our secret thrill of breaking the rules. Because, when it comes to food, the rules are everywhere: sugar is bad, greens are good, carbs are suspect, and dessert? Well, that depends on how much guilt you’re willing to swallow. But what if eating wasn’t a moral dilemma? What if you could enjoy your cake while eating healthily, too?
For years, diet culture has framed food indulgence as a problem to fix, placing foods on a moral spectrum—broccoli is virtuous, cake is sinful, apples are good, pies are bad. This black-and-white thinking, known as dichotomous thinking, evaluates food in rigid extremes. While this type of thinking is common, it’s not harmless. Dutch researchers found it was linked to rigid dieting and yo-yo weight cycling, while other studies have connected it to eating-disorder development.
When we impose moralistic food rules, we start believing that avoiding so-called “bad” foods is essential to “healthy eating”. But restricting foods such as cake often backfires. Studies show that when people forbid themselves certain foods, cravings intensify, leading to bingeing or guilt-ridden eating episodes.
Intuitive eating offers a different perspective. Instead of rigid rules, it encourages reconnecting with the body’s natural hunger and fullness cues, allowing ourselves to enjoy food without judgment, which means there are no “good” or “bad” foods. When we give ourselves unconditional permission to eat, we paradoxically crave less of what we once obsessed over.
Ask any seasoned intuitive-eating devotee, and they’ll tell you the same story: after giving themselves unconditional freedom to eat their craved foods, the cravings slowly disappeared. Take away the food rules and judgment, and craved foods become less appealing.
Intuitive eating is an evidence-based approach to nutrition that rejects diet culture and instead promotes tuning in to your body’s needs. We naturally find balance when we listen to our hunger and fullness cues. That doesn’t mean you’ll end up eating cake all day. It means making food choices based on what we want to eat, including how they physically make us feel – not based on guilt, pressure or arbitrary food rules. However, many people immediately worry that eating all the cake they want will make them fat and unhealthy.
Firstly, the assumption that weight determines health is fundamentally flawed; research tells a more complex story. The Health at Every Size (HAES) movement highlights that health is about behaviours, such as regular movement, balanced nutrition and stress management, rather than a specific body size. Weight cycling – the inevitable outcome of dieting – has been linked to greater health risks, whereas stable weight, regardless of size, is associated with better long-term outcomes.
And secondly, a key, often overlooked factor in eating well is satisfaction. If we eat a salad when we want cake, we might find ourselves rummaging through the pantry later, still searching for that missing flavour or texture. Allowing ourselves to eat what we truly enjoy without guilt often leads to eating less in the long run.
Strike the balance between enjoyment and wellbeing with these practical steps:
· Ditch the guilt: remember, food has no moral value. Eating cake doesn’t mean you’ve failed.
· Tune into hunger and fullness cues: pay attention to how your body feels before, during and after eating.
· Make peace with all foods: when you allow all foods into your diet, they lose their power over you.
· Savour your food: eat mindfully, focusing on taste and texture, to truly enjoy your food.
We’ll see real change if we stop treating food as the enemy and start seeing it as a source of nourishment and joy. The real secret to health isn’t avoiding cake but making peace with it.
