Fears That Hold Us Back from Intuitive Eating #1- "I Won't Stop Eating"
Photo by Louis Hansel (@louishansel) via Unsplash
“If I start eating anything I want, I won’t stop eating. I will gain so much weight and I will be so fat.”
If this is where you’re at; I hear you. You’re not alone if you’re scared that if you eat what you really want, you won’t be able to stop eating. I’d like to explore the “I won’t stop eating” fear by looking at what deeper fears might be hiding underneath.
People who eat intuitively honor their body’s hunger cues AND give themselves unconditional permission to eat what they want, when they want, in an amount that feels right for them in the moment. Unconditional permission to eat any food you like is one of the most critical steps in making peace with food. It’s really difficult to respond to your inner body signals when your mind is preoccupied with food rules and you feel guilty about eating. If you don’t really believe that you can eat any food that you like, you will continue to feel deprived and will eat past fullness (or binge) on your “forbidden foods”.
I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch. You can purchase a copy by clicking on my paid Amazon Associate link below:
Fear of foods that you consider “forbidden.” Deprivation is a major obstacle to making peace with food. Are there some foods that you still forbid yourself to eat? Perhaps chips or desserts? What are the foods that you’re afraid of keeping in the house for fear that you won’t stop eating them until they’re gone? Make a list of all the foods that you are currently restricting or forbidding yourself to eat.
What are your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings about these “forbidden” foods? Take a look at the list of foods that you’re continuing to restrict or forbidding yourself to eat. What are your first thoughts about these foods? Get curious- what are your beliefs and feelings about these foods? When I do this activity with clients I often get responses like: “My first thought when I think of ice cream is ‘yum’ and ‘I’d like to have some right now’. Then I think ‘I shouldn’t eat ice cream because I believe that it’s not healthy and has too many calories. Then I feel afraid that if I eat ice cream that I’ll get fat. That makes me feel bad about myself and it really makes me want to eat a bunch of ice cream right now!” As you can see from the example, the client has conflicting thoughts and feelings about ice cream and is operating under a belief system that ice cream will make them fat. The mere thought of restricting ice cream creates an urgency to eat a lot of ice cream in the moment. Creating rules around certain foods (e.g., “I shouldn’t eat this…”) gives the food item a lot of power. If you forbid yourself to eat a certain food because it’s “bad” the minute you have a desire to eat it, you start to feel guilty (“I’m doing something bad”) or ashamed “(I’m a bad person”). Neither you nor the food item are the problem; the rules and faulty beliefs are!!
How is fatphobia (fear of being or becoming fat) contributing to your fear of out-of-control eating? At the core of many food fears is fatphobia. The fear isn’t really about the food items themselves; it’s more often a perceived fear of what might happen to your body if you were to freely eat your “forbidden” foods without any rules, limits, or guidelines. Fatphobia keeps people stuck in cycles of deprivation and binge eating. When you are starving yourself because you want to lose weight, your body’s biological response is to eat more in response to an energy deficit. More energy restriction and deprivation isn’t the answer. No one food, meal, week of eating, etc. has the power to influence your weight status or health. Starting to look at how your diet mentality is triggering cycles of out-of-control eating is a kinder and more productive first step.
Overcoming the “I won’t stop eating” obstacle:
Remember that unconditional permission to eat any food is the key to making peace with food. When previously forbidden foods will forevermore be allowed, the urgency to eat them in large quantities with dissipate with time. This is called habituation. The more you allow and expose yourself to a certain food, the less appealing it becomes over time.
The only way to believe that you will be able to stop eating a certain food is to actually practice eating the food many times. Habituation will only happen when you continue to allow yourself and expose yourself to a particular food. It’s normal to want to eat foods over and over again, especially if you’ve restricted them for a long time. This is about rebuilding your experience with this food. If you’re afraid of dogs, for instance, interacting with one dog will not alleviate your fears. You would need to interact with a particular dog several times, then interact with different dogs in different situations, and so on. Adjusting your expectations is important. Food peace doesn’t happen overnight, but it does with practice, patience, and self-compassion!
The “chicken biscuit challenge” - I’m currently working with a client who has had a reoccurring craving for fast-food breakfast chicken biscuit sandwiches (a big thing here in the Southeastern USA!). They have eaten a chicken biscuit a couple of times in the past week, with a side order of guilt “(“I shouldn’t be eating something so unhealthy for breakfast”). My response was the opposite of what this person was expecting! I asked them what they liked about the chicken biscuit and how it would feel to give themselves permission to have one for breakfast (or any meal) as many times as they liked. This experiment is designed to create habituation by practicing full permission to eat a food they truly love and exposing themselves multiple times to the food without limitations. I suspect that my client will eventually lose interest in eating chicken biscuits every single day once they are allowed anytime. The goal for my client isn’t to eat so many chicken biscuits that they never want one again; the goal is to create a sense of safety and confidence so that this food is allowed anytime the client wants it (without the side of guilt!).
Facing our fears is an important part of the intuitive eating process. One bite at a time!!
Nicole