How Restriction Impacts on Your Health

One of the most common reasons people come to me for help is because they want “control with their food”. Unfortunately, their current experience feels like the total opposite, where food is actually controlling them.

The great irony with this is that the more that we try and control our food, the less control we feel we have over it. In the short term we may gain some control, but over the long haul, the grip becomes weaker and weaker until we can hold on no longer.

Why is this so?

Humans evolved when food wasn’t in an abundant supply. If we failed to eat, we would die, and so it became imperative we be bestowed with a mechanism that drove this desire to eat.

When you eat less than you need, the tendency is for the body to want to consume more when given the chance. Your body doesn’t understand your desire to be thin or toned or look a certain way that society deems appropriate.

It sees under eating as a famine, so it wants to protect you by getting you to eat when food becomes available.

(And this can happen regardless of weight and size. The idea that someone who is fat can just stop eating and be fine because they have all these stores of “energy” on them is nonsense. Whatever your size, their body will fight restriction).

While in the short term you can restrict or deprive yourself, as time goes on this becomes more difficult. And this can be restricting calories or it can be restricting specific foods for arbitrary reasons.

There’s only so long you can hold out and at some point, this resolve will start to fail, and you eat.      

This phenomenon is pretty well accepted and understood by most nutritionists and those in the health field. So nothing too earth-shattering here.

The Fear Of Future Famine

But what may surprise you is that it’s not just actual deprivation that causes the body to want to eat, but also impending deprivation.

If the body feels like a famine or period of deprivation is just around the corner, then it will want to eat. It wants to stock up as a precaution.

This also makes senses from an evolutionary perspective. If food was in abundance in the summer but harder to come by in the winter, it would make sense to be able to eat more and stock up your reserves in preparation for the leaner food months ahead.

So many people talk about the experience of eating “all the food” before going on a diet.

They decide that next week their new diet starts and in the preceding week they feel uncontrollable around food or find themselves eating way more than usual. If the diet is going to be cutting out carbs or fats or sugar, these are often the foods that they find themselves eating in large quantities before they start the new regime. 

But the same thing can happen even if someone is not following an official diet but just has “good” and “bad” foods. When they eat something “bad”, the immediate reaction can be that they’ve blown their diet, so “what the hell” and they eat more.

You typically eat more because in your mind you have decided that tomorrow you are back on being “good”. This translates to your body that tomorrow the deprivation starts again, so let’s get as much as possible in beforehand.

The Problem With Mental Restriction

And this leads to the next point about deprivation, which is that it is not always about physical deprivation, but also about mental deprivation.

You can be eating a chocolate brownie and therefore not physically be depriving yourself of it. But if you are eating this while chastising yourself or trying to eat it so fast it’s like it didn’t happen, then mentally you are depriving yourself. You are not mentally allowing yourself this food, even though you are physically eating it.

(I’ve previously talked about studies with milkshakes and ice cream that shows how this happens, which you can check out here.)

This is important because if you have a mentality of not allowing yourself some food even when you are eating it, what is this saying to your body? It is telling it that it’s likely in the near future that this food will be off limits again, that deprivation of this food will be restarting.

Our Thinking Affects Our Health

I’ve done a couple of podcasts on cognitive dietary restraint (they are here and here.)

Cognitive dietary restraint is defined as the perceived ongoing effort to limit dietary intake to manage body weight. But what’s interesting is this is about the mental process, not what actually happens in reality. Irrespective of whether someone actually restricts their food, cognitive dietary restraint is about the intention.

And what the research has found (and that I cover in the podcast episodes) is that this way of thinking about food and weight has an impact on our health and our abilities. It can negatively affect menstrual cycles, bone health, immune function, inflammation, blood pressure, pulse rate, and cognitive ability.

Then how do you get more “control” around food without damaging health?

Well, the first thing is to stop trying to control your food. People (unintentionally) get themselves into this mess because they create arbitrary rules around food. They tell themselves what they can and can’t have. They stop listening to their body (or only listen when it tells them to eat “good” or “healthy” food).

The usual response to this suggestion is that if I allowed myself to eat what I wanted, I would eat nothing but ice cream and chocolate, and would blow up to the size of a house.

In reality, this isn’t the case. The cravings and desires for these foods are exponentially high because they are “banned” or “forbidden” or “bad”. Take your favourite food and eat it three meals a day every day and see how exciting it is in a very short space of time. Pretty quickly it’s no longer that interesting. You’ll probably grow to detest it (or at least you’ll have no desire to eat it in the short term).

Yes, there are foods that are more or less palatable or exciting. But we make this much more so because of the emotions and “rules” that we attach to eating these foods.

Legalising Foods

When we legalise all foods we take away food’s power and return it to just being food.

This may not happen overnight and if there has been a period of deprivation, then in the short term you may find yourself eating more of these foods. But as time goes on, the more you allow yourself to eat whatever your body craves, the more you’ll notice that it craves a wide variety and foods that genuinely support your health.

When people can do this, they feel more in control of their food choices. This is rather paradoxical because really they aren’t in control but are simply listening to their body. Irrespective, they feel more in control because they are accepting of this way of eating and are ok with whatever way of eating feels right.

Two final points that are important in making this work.

You need to do body image work and become ok with your body where it is now and where it may end up. The majority of people’s reasons for controlling their food are around manipulating their weight. It’s almost impossible to be ok with your eating when you are worried about the consequences of “how will it affect my waistline”.

Food Issues Can Be Both A Problem And A (Temporary) Solution 

Secondly, if control around food isn’t about weight, then you need to work out what it is about.

As part of this, you’ll probably need to branch out your coping mechanisms for dealing with this issue (or alternatively finding a way to solve it, if it is solvable).

It’s one thing to want to improve your relationship with food and not feel so “out of control”. But if in reality, it is these out of control moments that you are using to serve you and help deal with other life issues, then it’s unlikely your relationship with food will get significantly better without dealing with this other stuff. 

And this “other stuff” could be specific issues or it could simply be stress in a more general sense.

There was a post on Facebook that I once saw that went something like:

“Mike Tyson said ‘every boxer has a plan ‘til they get punched in the face’. And for normal people trying to eat healthily or follow a plan, their “punch in the face” is stress”

I’d substitute the words “normal people” for “dieters” or people trying to control their food and then think this is bang on.

At the end of the day, food isn’t the enemy. Your eating behaviours are a reflection of what is going on at a physiological and psychological level. Fighting harder and digging your heels in rarely (if ever) works long term.

But being honest about where this stuff is coming from and why it is really happening, in my opinion, is a far better approach. 

Getting Past Restriction With Food

Many of my clients are seasoned dieters and have spent years (or decades) going on one diet after another. Swinging between restriction and feeling out of control.

I’m a leading expert and advocate for full recovery. I’ve been working with clients for over 15 years and understand what needs to happen to recover.

I truly believe that you can reach a place where the eating disorder is a thing of the past and I want to help you get there. If you want to fully recover and drastically increase the quality of your life, I’d love to help.

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