“ONCE I START, I CAN’T STOP”

When it comes to food restriction - through dieting or in some more clinical eating disorders - clients often express a sense of fear: They limit themselves because once they start eating, they won’t be able to stop. And then when they do allow themselves access to food more freely, their worse fears are confirmed! The entire package of cookies or box of crackers or bag of chips disappears, despite their best efforts to “eat just one serving”. So what is going on here? It can be maddening because, to the client, it feels like they are failing miserably at something that should very much be under their control and that if they’re just more disciplined, just have just a *little* more willpower, or distract themselves, they can resist the temptation to eat the entire box.

One of the things I can say with near certainty is that when I see this pattern, I look for the other side of the coin: Where is the restriction? Restriction and then subsequently eating more than feels comfortable in one sitting (sometimes called ‘bingeing’) go hand in hand and here’s why: Our bodies require pretty specific amounts of energy (or calories) to function from day to day. This is not just for the visible activities we take part in, like planned exercise or movement in our daily lives, but also for the invisible processes that we might not even think of, like brain energy, cellular repair, organ functioning, and a whole host of other micro-level activities that take up the bulk of our energy. And through evolution, the body is primed to seek enough energy everyday to meet these needs.

So I think of our bodies’ energy intake like a pendulum: Eat less than our body optimally requires to survive and the body will literally drive an increase in energy intake, not just “sufficient” to meet needs, but often more than what the body needs because it is making up for a deficit. The body does not care if this is an intentional deficit, as through dieting and restriction. It just knows, “Ah, we did not meet our needs today so we will try to get as much as possible to compensate and even excess, to serve as an insurance policy, should this deficit continue to happen.” This is the swinging pendulum of restriction and then feeling unable to stop at 9pm at night when the body has taken in only a fraction of its energy needs. And because the body has evolved with this safety mechanism in place for millions of years, it is always going to win over our so-called “willpower” - what we “think” is best for us. 

You can think of it this way: Imagine you’re trekking through the desert and have run out of water. The sun is burning down, your throat is parched, you’re dehydrated and exhausted. When you finally reach an oasis, you throw yourself down in front of it and take huge gulps of the fresh, cool water; not polite little sips. And you don’t think, “How silly - I don’t usually need this much water.” Instead, you know require more because you’ve been in a deficit all day and you’re compensating for this. The same is true for food energy. But instead of feeling dehydrated, you might be tired, irritable, brain foggy, or generally unhappy. Or perhaps you feel euphoric! You’ve survived on so little! You must be superhuman! And then you watch, almost in a trance, as your body walks to the cupboard and pulls out the snack foods and begins to devour them greedily, like slurping water from the oasis. This is what we could call your “Starvation Brain” or as Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani coined, your “Cave Person Brain” kicking in to gear. It is our most primitive survival brain, evolved to keep us alive. Again, Starvation Brain does not care that we are on a diet. It does not care that we are perfectly content to eat less than our body needs to function optimally. All that brain knows is survival. And it will win out every single time.

So what’s the solution? How do we interrupt the cycle of not being able to stop eating something one we start? Let’s return to the image of the pendulum. A pendulum swings because at one point, it was held to one side (or restricted) and then released so that it swings with equal and opposite force to the other side of its arc. But what happens when we stop interfering with the pendulum? Eventually and inevitably, it always settles in the middle because that is science, a law of physics (don’t ask me which one!). The exact same thing is true of our bodies. When we stop interfering with the ability of our energy expenditure and intake to roughly match one another, we allow our hunger and fullness drives to settle too. And this does not necessarily happen each and every day. There is a wonderful study from the 1980s that charts the milk intake of an infant over the course of several weeks and of note, the intake is wildly different from day to day: 20 oz one day, 15 the next, 28 the next and so forth. But what is remarkable is that the *average* was essentially the same from week to week, allowing for very normal and predictable growth on the infant’s growth chart. The same is true for adults: We might eat more one day at a party because the food is different, tastier, more exciting than what we typically have access to. And then the body will ON ITS OWN compensate over the course of days or a week by eating a little less. We don’t need to DO anything - we just need to keep allowing access to a variety of food throughout the day and let the body’s hunger and fullness cues take over.

One important note, if you have been controlling your food intake, rather than letting your body do its job, it can be challenging to get back into the swing of trusting your body to settle where its supposed to. This is where enlisting a trained Dietitian can become helpful - to relearn what its like to allow the body’s energy pendulum to swing freely, and to get in touch with how that feels. It’s sort of like re-training, getting back into the body of that infant who knew when to start and stop drinking milk, even without a blueprint.