Burn it to earn it? Or can you just enjoy food this holiday season?

Keep going… feel the burn… yeah, you gotta burn it to earn it… work off those calories so you can eat tonight! shouted the fitness instructor during my exercise class. It was exhausting. Every muscle in my legs ached — it felt as if I’d worked off my lunch.

My barre teacher was echoing that well-known fitness message — that we need to earn our food to enjoy it. And for years, my view of food and exercise was exactly the same: if I ate cake or a burger, it was OK, so long as I’d racked up the minutes on the bike.

For me, exercise was compensation for eating. From what I (thought I) understood, if I wanted to maintain or lose weight, I needed to burn off more calories than I was eating. Eat less, move more, as they say. I’d mentally calculate how many hours at the gym were needed to deserve the right to eat my food.

Every time food passed my lips I wondered whether I should be eating. I would feel particularly guilty if I ate a big meal and think about how I’d have to make up for it. In fact, I had calculated just how many minutes I would need to either walk or jog off a bar of chocolate, a can of soda and a piece of cake. It was very stressful to always think of food in this way.

Worse still, I would feel upset if I missed a gym day or a workout. I thought that one missed HIIT class would see the weight piling back on, that I’d lose my muscle tone and more importantly, that it meant I didn’t really deserve to eat that day.

As the holiday season approaches, it’s worth considering how helpful (or true) this message is… Should exercise feel like punishment for eating a bar of chocolate?

It’s only now years later (and having recovered from this disordered view of exercise and healed my relationship with food), I see clearly that this perspective misses the point. Exercise should be a celebration of our bodies, not a guilt trip.

When we start to view movement as something we must suffer through to atone for our eating sins, it harms our relationship with both exercise and food.

As a food freedom psychologist, this is my answer: no, you don’t need to burn it to earn it; and yes, you can enjoy food during the holiday season. Here’s why…

#1 We deserve to eat no matter what

The burn it to earn it message suggests that we must earn the right to eat. However we need food to survive — it’s a basic human necessity. So you really do deserve to eat, feel full and be nourished, even if you didn’t go to the gym today.

If you’re always thinking about how many calories you need to burn when you have dessert, it complicates your relationship with food. When you’re out on a Friday night eating some pizza, but you’re worrying about whether you deserve to do so, you’re neither present, nor enjoying quality time with friends. You’ll be missing out on meaningful moments with friends and family (very much like I used to).

#2 We are not defined by our body

The idea that we must earn the right to eat comes from associating our worth with our weight. To define yourself by your shape and appearance assumes that we are a body. Yet we are more than a body. Your food intake and levels of exercise don’t define you — but your compassion, creativity, kindness and warmth do.

#3 Eating less is not “good”

Somewhere along the line we came to think that less is more when it comes to eating. We’ve been programmed to think we are being “good” when we eat like a bird and “bad” when we feel full. Yet under-eating will leave you under-nourished and nutrient-deficient.

The burn it message ends up normalising disordered eating where we begin to feel naughty for eating cake and feel good for burning it off. Moralising food in this way is not how to maintain a healthy relationship with food.

#4 You might be ignoring your body’s signals

Alongside “burn it to earn it”, you might also hear other toxic fitness messages like “never miss a Monday / workout”. Taken together, there’s an undercurrent that we must ignore how our bodies are feeling. What if you are sick, or feeling low energy, or had a really busy day at work? Sometimes resting is what your body needs, not a hardcore HIIT training.

If we are so caught up in the burn it message, it’s easy to ignore our body’s signals because we are fixated on working off our latest meal.

#5 Burn it to earn it feels like punishment

The foundation of movement shouldn’t be built on guilt. If we start to resent exercise because it feels like punishment, we might start avoiding it altogether.

In any case, exercise is about so much more than merely burning calories. Not only is exercise great for our physical health (improving cardiovascular health, decreasing blood pressure and increasing bone density), but it’s also fantastic for our mental health as we produce feel-good chemicals that boost our mood.

The bottom line is that regularly linking food to exercise can create a disordered relationship with both. There are so many reasons to exercise beyond “earning food”. Yes food is fuel and energy, but it’s also enjoyment and satisfaction.

The only time to link food and exercise is when you’re fuelling up for an endurance sport. So during the holiday season, you can enjoy your lunch without scheduling extra workouts to “burn it off”.