I can’t be trusted with it in the house” and other beliefs that qualify as disordered eating
It’s that time of year again. Candy fills the grocery store shelves. Every party seems to require large amounts of candy and other treats with sugar. Caramel apples, apple cider, donuts, and chocolate feel like obligatory parts of October.
Suddenly, you find that you feel a sense of dread about everything. Work, volunteering for your kid’s school party, neighborhood get-togethers, and worst of all – trick-or-treating. You wish you could hide for the entire month. You don’t want the treats. You need it out of your house. You know you will eat all of it. You fear that you are the one person in the world who has zero self-control. You hate that you find yourself bingeing on the candy just to get rid of it.
Every year it is the same. You feel out of control and scared. You give yourself rules or start exercising more. Only to find you can’t stick with it and you are melting down in a sea of sugar.
Disordered Eating
If this sounds like you, it’s time to work on your relationship with food. Disordered eating is tricky because it is often lauded as a good thing in our diet-culture-saturated world. We celebrate the people who restrict and go without — though this restriction often backfires. We think we are the only people not achieving lasting weight loss (spoiler alert, you aren’t – 95-98% of people regain weight after dieting).
Disordered eating is often described as having rigid rituals, routines, and rules around food and exercise. Again, this is tricky territory as it isn’t an eating disorder yet, but is certainly disordered.
I think a better way to describe disordered eating, though, is by how it feels. Are you preoccupied with food? Do you spend huge amounts of your day thinking about food when you are not a chef? Does going to events with food cause you anxiety? Same with holidays?
Preoccupation with food, eating, body image, and exercise in a way that reduces your quality of life is disordered eating. Especially when these things have an undercurrent of guilt and shame.
Another sign of disordered eating is yo-yo dieting. Trying diet, after diet, after diet. If you feel a sense of loss of control over food or engage in compulsive eating then you likely have disordered eating or an eating disorder.
Disordered eating not only reduces your quality of life, but it can lead to eating disorders that can be life-threatening.
The Restriction Cycle:
If you are finding yourself described in this post, you are not alone. The Restrict/Binge Shame Cycle is familiar to so many of us. We think that what we lack is willpower. If we really cared about our health we would be able to never eat those foods again. Right? After all, every sensationalized media headline about food says we are poisoning ourselves with sugar, chips, and fried foods. Obviously, the answer is to restrict.
Do not think about white bears. Seriously, stop! What’s that? Now that I’ve said white bears you are definitely thinking about them?
In 1863, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”1 This phenomenon was later coined “ironic process theory.” This essentially is why trying to suppress certain thoughts just makes it more likely that we will think those thoughts.
Apply this to food. It is Halloween. You desperately want that Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup. You aren’t going to think about it though. You are going to ignore it. You’ve been so “good” restricting all those treats. But you can’t get it out of your head. So you cave. Instead of having one or two, you inhale the candy bowl.
What is the solution?
Fixing your relationship with food. Believe it or not, in order to make peace with food we have to first stop restricting food. Think of it this way, if some foods are “good” or “healthy” and others are “bad” or “unhealthy” when we eat the “good” foods we must be really good ourselves. We are not only healthy and health conscious, we are good.
Now let’s say we decide to eat “bad” food, suddenly we are failures. We are unhealthy, bad people. Logically we know this isn’t true, and yet, we feel it is true. If you’ve ever experienced eating “bad” food and then feeling like you’ve blown it, so you continue to eat more things that don’t leave you feeling your best until you are miserable, the food labeling could be to blame. It’s called the “what the Hell” effect.
If all food is just food, we are able to tune into our bodies. To understand what we want and what feels good. We can hear our body tell us when it has had enough of certain things. We can honor our cravings and our health all at the same time.
This is easier said than done. Learning to overcome disordered eating takes a lot of work, and sometimes requires the help of trained professionals. But the payoff is getting all that brain space back that has been devoted to dieting, food, and obsession. The payoff is a better quality of life.
Over time, as we continue to honor our bodies, we become habituated to those fun foods that caused us so much anxiety every time October rolled around. We enjoy a treat, but not in a way that causes guilt or physical illness. We get to a place where we can enjoy the holidays again, food and all.
References:
Warmly,
Melanee
she/her/hers
