I've decided to use the term "convenience food" instead of "junk food."
I think it's more honest, and less loaded. It's all food, some of it is more appropriate when you don't have the spoons left for food prep. It takes slightly more energy to peel a banana than to open a bag of chips.
We try to save the convenience food for days when we need something easy, so eat a banana.
ENNH! WRONG ANSWER
All food fuels your body. If it contains calories, it is fuel. Some foods are denser fuels, some foods have nice additional benefits, but all foods fuel you.
Some foods are really good for building muscle, or supporting your bone health, or giving you energy. Some foods are really good at tasting nice. All of them fuel your body.
Good food/bad food is just puritan dichotomous thinking in service of the Shame Industrial Complex- let's get those "should" hooks intob everything you enjoy.
Food is fuel. Your relationship with it is personal. Almost all dichotomies oversimplify beyond utility.
So, I had to do a bunch of therapy as a kid because I had anorexia. My dietician drilled into me "food has no moral value. there's no such thing as Good Food or Bad Food; if it's edible and you're not allergic to it, then it has a use in your diet, even if that use is just 'enjoy eating it'. Enjoyment is part of your diet and happiness is a vital nutrient." Basically, even if ice cream "isn't healthy," if it helps you feel better after a shitty day then it's fulfilling one of your basic needs: happiness. So eat the fucking ice cream and feel better. ENJOYMENT IS PART OF YOUR DIET AND HAPPINESS IS A NUTRIENT
This sends me back to a high school health class decades ago, 15 years old, the first task the teacher gives us is to sort a list of foods into "healthy" and "unhealthy." Everyone's lists look similar. Garden salad, apples, milk, bread: healthy. (This was back before certain fad diets tainted the idea of "bread" for so many people, and the dairy industry was running ads telling you how your bones would shatter if you didn't drink a glass of milk every day.) Butter, cookies, ice cream, pizza: unhealthy.
He then asked us to choose one food to take with us on a desert island, and that would be the only food we could eat for the next three years, in order to stay healthy.
When everyone was done, and just about everyone chose something like "salad" for their desert island food, he told us we'd been lied to all our lives. He explained that the world (and largely advertising media) had taught us that foods that tasted good were bad for you, and that calories were unhealthy and to be avoided.
All of these foods are healthy, he said. You can't survive on any one of them alone because they all give you something you need. Although too much refined sugar had been shown to cause heart disease, that didn't make foods containing sugar inherently bad to eat. Fat is not bad for you. Flavor is not bad for you. Calories are not bad for you - calories are literally the fuel we need to survive.
Those students who tried to survive for three years on lettuce alone were going to die of malnutrition, and probably have pretty terrible diarrhea along the way.
If you need to survive, you want the pizza. You want the cookies. You want to be eating sticks of butter to keep yourself fueled.
This led to a series of in-depth lessons about what different types of nutrition do for our bodies, what calories actually are and do, how the presence of refined sugar in a food did not negate the nutrition the other ingredients provide, how hunger is a sign that you should eat, how starvation is not healthy, how pleasure should not make you feel guilty.
This was almost 25 years ago, so not all of the information was in line with what we now know about these things. There was unfortunately no lesson on how fatness or thinness were not any sign of health or lack of it, nothing about how BMI was nonsense, nothing about how your weight and body shape are mostly determined by genetics alone.
But the lesson that calories are not the enemy, that eating so-called "unhealthy" food is better than not eating, that salads are great for some things but you need butter too, that pizza is extremely nutritious. How even the ice cream has calories, fats, calcium, and vitamins in it that your body needs. I will never stop being grateful to that teacher for imparting that knowledge to me at a formative age.
And a lot of you on this site today are around that age, and probably being bombarded with even more vile propaganda trying to twist your relationship to food. So let me pass this on to you.
Eat the ice cream. It's good for you.
If depression has taught me anything it taught me that food is a constant struggle. Either you're too depressed to eat anything at all, or you're depressed about not eating what you "should" eat so you starve yourself or eat "junk" anyway and feel guilty and shameful about it thus increasing the depression. Eating well is a luxury. It requires time and money and energy. If you don't have it, you don't have it. Eating ANYthing is better than nothing. Always. It is never better to starve yourself or guilt/shame yourself because you can't eat what you "should." Just put something in your body so you can keep existing until you can get to the point where you can eat better.
