If you’ve been following along, this is part 2 of the 3 Part Miniseries: Fears Holding You Back From A Healthy & Peaceful Relationship with Food & Body. Part 1 was all about how to navigate the fear of weight gain. In this post we’ll cover some other common fears that might come with letting go of food rules and legalizing “off limit’ foods.
If you’ve heard about intuitive eating, you’ve probably heard about allowing yourself “unconditional permission to eat.”
Outside the fear of weight gain, what comes to mind when you think about “unconditional permission to eat?”
“If I start eating anything I want, I won’t stop eating?”
“I’ll only ever want to eat ice cream and burgers, so I won’t eat healthfully?”
If either of these resonate, I hear you. And it’s totally understandable to feel this way. When you deprive yourself of food (whether physically or mentally) and label foods or eating actions as “good” or “bad”, you set yourself up for negative thoughts and feelings of guilt and shame around food that lead to restrictive or ‘overeating/’binge’ behaviors. This is how the restrict/binge cycle perpetuates. It’s guilt driven and it starts with deprivation.
When you let go of moralizing food and eating actions while legalizing food choices, you free yourself from that cycle. And it’s only when you start removing deprivation that you can get out of that vicious cycle and start responding to inner eating signals that have been smothered by external rules and judgements. It’s when you don’t have unconditional permission to eat any food in any amount whenever you want, that you will ultimately continue to feel deprived. Let’s break down each of these fears down:
Fears Holding You Back From a Healthy Relationship With Food & Body:
“I won’t stop eating.”
Does it feel like, “if I give myself permission to eat my fav foods that are usually off-limits, I’ll just binge on that food forever?” This is where habituation comes in. The habituation response explains why we adapt to a repeated experience and with each repeated exposure, we derive less pleasure and excitement from it. For example, if you make a lasagna Sunday night and you eat it throughout the rest of the week….the first few times probably taste pretty good. But by the end of the week, lasagna is likely the last thing you want to eat again.
Dieting doesn’t allow for habituation to occur. When you’re dieting you’re “staying on track” by not allowing certain foods. So those foods are put on restricted pedestals to where they become VERY exciting. So when you do allow yourself those foods such as on “cheat days’ or if you “fall off the wagon”, eating those foods is done so in an urgent and chaotic way to where it feels like you can’t get enough of that food.
Restriction doesn’t allow for repeated exposure.
So the only way you will come to believe that you’ll be able to stop eating is to actually eat the restricted food. Habituation will only happen when you continue to allow yourself and expose yourself to a particular food.
You’ll know you’re experiencing habituation when you’ve looked at a previously “off-limits” food and think, “I don’t feel like eating that today, but I know it’s there if I want to come back to it later. And no matter whether I choose to eat it or not, there is not right or wrong – it just is.”
There’s no telling how many times you will eat a food in order for habituation to kick in. It looks different for everyone. It’s about building your experience with food and it will take time for the novelty and intense excitement to wear off.
If this feels impossible right now, think back to your history with diets and restriction. How many years did you spend counting, tracking, measuring, sticking to strict meal plans, obsessively weighing yourself? How many more years do you want to live feeling out of control around food?
It makes total sense to feel uncomfortable about allowing yourself complete unconditional permission to eat. But I assure you, with time and practice exposing yourself, the more confidence you will have around food.
“I won’t eat healthfully.”
Another common fear and misconception someone might have about unconditional permission is they’ll only ever want “unhealthy” foods if they have free choice and access to eat any food. Leaving the comfort of your food rules, such as what, when and how much to eat, that dictate your “healthy” eating can feel like a panic free fall. Like “what about nutrition?!” “What about healthy foods and unhealthy foods?!” Making peace with food is a process of neutralizing food and giving yourself permission to experience food free of guilt, shame or stress. And in order to do this it’s important to leave moralizing labels at the door. This is why nutrition is not the driving force at this point in the process. When there’s a lot of emphasis on nutrition, restrictive thoughts and behaviors can take over and derail and prolong progress – keeping you stuck in a diet state of mind.
It’s when you go through the peace process and give yourself free choice and access to any food, that your eating will end up balancing itself out to include mostly nutritious foods with a sprinkling of fun foods.
Because believe it or not, our bodies crave variety, balance and nutritious foods. It’s when our bodies and brains are bogged down with restrictive thoughts and behaviors that we become disconnected from what our bodies are trying to tell us.
Even now think about eating an ice cream brownie sundae at every meal. How soon do you think you’ll start craving something opposite? Here’s another example that might resonate with a real life experience: think about a long vacation full of eating – restaurants, bar food, airport food, ice cream, burgers, bowls of pasta, pizza – mostly all the fun foods, right?
Now what’s the first thing you crave once you return home? Is it more burgers and fries and ice cream? Or is it a home cooked meal? Or a giant salad? This is post vacation scenario is an example of a heightened craving for nutritious foods. As you move along in the process and all foods are completely allowed, you’ll get to know your intuitive signals, and as you practice you’ll get to know them on a much more subtle level. It’s when you listen for your signals that they’ll start taking over and guide you toward variety, balance and nutritious foods. Your body is wise and will get what it needs!
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