what we talk about when we talk about guilt

I'm interested in what we mean when we say we feel "guilty" about not running, or about eating too much ice cream.  Tammi picked up a copy of Women's Health magazine at the grocery store the other day, a publication that simultaneously tells women 1) to eat as much as they want because it's empowering not to capitulate to impossible social norms surrounding the body and 2) to exercise and cut calories in order to conform to impossible social norms.  It's not news that women's magazines are schizoid in this way, of course, but the letter from the editor was particularly illuminating for the way it used the word "guilt" in reference to eating in Europe.  Editor Michelle Promaulayko talks about being "liberated from carb phobia" while in France, but feeling "guilty" about eating so damn much when she returns to New York.  Guilt, she says, is "an icky, discouraging force that rarely does any good," and further, that it "isn't innate, but by product of social conditioning."  OK, readers are probably thinking, leave the editor of this toilet reading alone and get a life--Women's Health is about toned biceps and recipes for whole-grain pancakes.

A few points nonetheless.  Guilt actually does a lot of good, and of course it's not innate, and of course it's a product of social conditioning: it's one of the most sociable emotions we have!  It tells us when we've become alienated from other people and encourages us to get right with them.  But obviously, this is not the sense in which she's (mis)using the word: she means to say, when it comes to exercising, something like anxiety, the stress that missing a workout or overeating can cause, the stress that comes from acting against our own best interest and against the interests of our better selves.  We have no way to describe this feeling since it's unique to an exercise and diet culture that's a historical product of the twentieth century--guilt becomes the metaphor through which we describe a particular type of emotion associated with this particular cultural and historical phenomenon, etc.

Which is to say, we've adapted the word guilt to describe failing at the practice of self-care and self-improvement, and the failure to deny ourselves the brownies of pleasure that are incompatible with self-improvement. 

A few weeks ago, on the occasion of Jack LaLane's death, Frank Bruni nicely summed up the notion of exercise guilt:

"That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you could pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These, too, are his doing, at least in part. What he left behind when he died last week, at the toned old age of 96, was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul."

He goes on to make the point that the "virtue" of exercise lies in the thinking that one form of self-control begets another.  Good point, Frank Bruni. Is Bruni right?  When we talk about exercise guilt, are we really talking about shame over a failure of self-control?  Why is self-control such an important thing?