Checking in While Eating

I know I touched on this before, but it hit me again as I was looking at the dozens of frozen cookie dough balls, pints of untouched ice cream, and bags of unopened potato chips today. Weeks go by without thinking about these foods at all. I'm definitely not resisting urges to eat them all at once or using special strategies to stop eating them if I start. For the entire time that I was restricting what I ate (30+ years), I assumed that if I quit actively controlling my food, boredom eating, emotional eating, and extreme hunger would take over and I would get huge. Here is how I described myself in my own self-talk and in several jillion blog and message board posts: I have no off switch. I will eat until I explode. I can't control myself around certain foods. Once I start eating, I can't stop. I want to keep eating even when I'm very full. I eat when I'm bored, anxious, happy, sad, and for a million other reasons. I like to numb out with food. I gain weight quickly if I don't restrict. If I let myself eat whatever I want, I only want sugar, salt, fat, and fried food. In my mind, there was zero chance that I could maintain a "normal" weight without actively controlling my food intake. I was sure of it because anytime I stopped dieting I’d feel totally crazed and my weight would jump quickly and dramatically. I’d think, well, this is how I am when I don’t restrict. Eating "intuitively" or "to appetite" may work for other people but it’s obviously not going to work for me. My appetite is out of control. Of course, I'd be thinking this after ten days, or three weeks, or two months of giving myself a little more freedom and a lot of guilt. That's not long enough to convince a body that's been hungry for decades that everything is A-OK now. Extreme hunger was still in full swing. Emotions were still running high. When you've been in a prolonged energy deficit, or you've been nurturing a scarcity mindset, or you're gearing up to restrict again soon, any reason to eat is a good reason according to your body. That doesn't mean its broken, or you're broken, or you're doomed to a life of lettuce and nutrition software. Turns out I was a hopeless emotional eater and an enthusiastic storer of body fat when I was chronically underfed. It's crazy what happens when you're not anymore. You realize that you meant to bake and eat some of those cookies three weeks ago but still haven't gotten around to it. You go out to eat, get exactly what you want, and share some of it because you're too full. You forget to eat part of your work meal but don't notice until you find it warm and squishy in your lunch box the next day. You're home alone with the television for ten hours and it doesn't even occur to you to have a food party. I don't know that I would have believed this without experiencing it. ALL of my evidence was to the contrary, but in hindsight it makes sense. I was hungry. That's it. My body had a lot of stuff to repair from years of overtraining and undereating, which required more food over longer stretches of time than I deemed ladylike. But now that it's finally getting everything it needs, holy hell, I do have an off switch! A good sturdy reliable one. It's interesting to consider that all that emotional eating, boredom eating, habitual eating, addictive desire, mindless eating, everything I used to call it, everything I most feared, only exists if I restrict my food. It was so intense and so seemingly real that I couldn't just go with it and wait to see what happened. I let off of the restriction incrementally. As long as I continued to move in that direction, things continued to get better. A particularly helpful approach was to only focus on right now. At this meal I'm going to eat what I want until I'm satisfied. That goes better than telling old stories about what I always do, or making plans about what I'm going to do from now on . Deal in the right now, and if right now you want to restrict, include some deliberate element of doing the opposite. Maybe you will order the salad at dinner but share a dessert too. Or you will eat the veggie omelet, but with plenty of cheese. Deliberately messing up any kind of "perfect" eating keeps you from feeling either deprived or out of control. You're going to make this meal as satisfying and enjoyable as possible. That's it. It's excellent practice and you get to do it multiple times per day, which builds skills and confidence quickly.

You guys, I am SO FULL! A friend and I ate at our favorite Italian place that I haven't been to in a year. I had bread and olive oil, an appetizer, a salad, an entree, and dessert. I remember thinking, halfway through the lasagna, I'm good now. I could stop. But the food and conversation were so good that we kept laughing and talking and eating until we practically needed to be rolled to our cars. Totally worth it! I would not enjoy getting that full every day. I have zero concern that I will do it again anytime soon or that it will affect a single thing. Here's what I will do: Eat whenever I get hungry again. Here's what I will not do: Overthink it, get on a scale, or compensate in any way. I know my body has it under control. Even if I do something silly, it will naturally adjust appetite, body temperature, digestion, movement, everything. All I need to do is let it. Last night: Blaaaaah errrgh aaarg. So full. Never eating again... This morning: Wakes up hungry. Eats. It's funny how that works. Being very full used to cause me to panic, not because of the stomach sensation but because of what I was telling myself that it meant. "You always...You never...This is why...Hopeless...Weak...Broken." When I treated eating a lot of food like a failure on my part, it felt super dramatic and scary. When I don't assign any meaning to it at all, I can just move on. In the moment, everything is fine. I can do whatever I need to in terms of self care without making myself feel like everything is ruined or my future is in jeopardy. I think that response came into being because I thought it would be helpful. If I freak out and shame myself, maybe I will eat better and lose weight. Then after doing it a few thousand times, it was the automatic response to eating more food than usual, even if it was total nonsense and actively counterproductive. Those thought patterns can be changed though. The more we untangle food and identity, or food and self-worth, the more we're able to notice our actual needs and calmly meet them.

Low level restriction can be tricky to even identify. I kept being surprised by it. You've done something for years. You do it automatically. You're maybe not even thinking about why you started doing it. You just measure that cereal, or make sandwiches with one piece of bread, or don't let yourself snack, or buy the "light" version. I'd ask myself, "Why am I doing this? Do I even like mustard? Wouldn't I rather have mayo? Why can't I eat after dinner?" What I realized was that a lot of those default actions contributed to being less satisfied. So, I'd think about food more, I'd experience cravings, I'd have trouble stopping eating, and I'd later eat in ways I didn't like. Not only was the low level restriction not helpful for weight control (its whole purpose), it was causing me to struggle with things that satisfaction shuts all the way down. The miracle of satisfaction is that you're not hungry, you're not even thinking about food. That satisfied state is actually far more conducive to a stable healthy weight than hunger + crazy. Staying in the moment and eating for satisfaction right now heads off a whole lot of struggle and chaos.