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" Many of us have watched (or been) the friend who happily eats bite-sized portions of quinoa and kale. &amp;quot;No, seriously! It&amp;#039;s so much more delicious than a hamburger or pasta!&amp;quot; she chirps. And yet, there it is \u2014 the glimmer of madness in her eyes. Somewhere, in a place deep enough that not even the juicing, boot camp classes and raw-foods diets could get to, she wanted the tortellini with butternut squash and goat cheese. So why wouldn&amp;#039;t she get it? Because \u2014 no big revelation here \u2014 we&amp;#039;ve internalized the idea that eating food that actually tastes good is an indulgence, not a right.   And no wonder we have. Since many of us were young girls, we&amp;#039;ve taken in the weird checks-and-balances system presented to us by the media. Did you eat a cupcake? Better burn off those calories at the gym! Have a piece of birthday cake? Do a Jillian Michaels DVD! These options are framed as a gift to women, a way to &amp;quot;allow&amp;quot; us to eat what we want \u2014 but we don&amp;#039;t need to be &amp;quot;allowed.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s time to de-program ourselves from the mentality that we need to atone for every calorie we consume.   A guy can eat a bucket of Popeyes, sleep in, and have leftover cold pizza for breakfast, and he&amp;#039;s just &amp;quot;being a guy.&amp;quot; A woman (this woman, anyway) debates about getting salad or chicken wings, makes her friends promise to help her eat the wings, eats like two wings, self-flagellates, and wakes up at 7 the next morning for guilty yoga. If you&amp;#039;re working out because you enjoy it and you&amp;#039;re health-conscious \u2014 positive feelings \u2014 then great. If you&amp;#039;re working out because you&amp;#039;re guilty and ashamed of the calories you consumed the night before \u2014 experiencing food shame \u2014 you should stop and consider where this self-hate is coming from.   I know a woman who will only drink Ketel One with soda because it has very few calories. She has been doing this since she was about 15. While not everyone suffers from a diagnosable eating disorder during their susceptible teen years, thank God, almost every woman I know has had some kind of Eating Disorder Lite that was hard to recover from. Sometimes it manifested in extreme weight loss, but often it was only mental. The less you eat, the thinner you get, the better you will be, the thinking goes. It wasn&amp;#039;t about male attention \u2014 it was more about their image of themselves and how they saw themselves in the eyes of other women.   What is that whole &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t need to watch what you eat, but I do!&amp;quot; thing we all do? It&amp;#039;s like the modern female verson of Abbot and Costello&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s On First&amp;quot; bit. It&amp;#039;s ridiculous.   You: &amp;quot;I shouldn&amp;#039;t have it, I skipped the gym yesterday, but you should totally have it.&amp;quot;   Friend: &amp;quot;Noooo! Look at my stomach, I can&amp;#039;t have it.&amp;quot;   You: &amp;quot;Have it!&amp;quot;   Friend: &amp;quot;No, you have it! I&amp;#039;ll watch you eat it and be so happy for you!&amp;quot;   You: &amp;quot;No! Let&amp;#039;s eat leaves!&amp;quot;   Friend: &amp;quot;Yay, leaves!&amp;quot;   Next time you start to do this, stop yourself. Get two heaping servings of whatever the deliciousness is. And then get dessert.   Follow Anna on Twitter.   Image via MTV "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a5025/cupcake-workout-fuuu/>