Episode 25: Emotional Eating - Ditching the Restriction

Dieting is commonly thought of as a solution to stop emotional eating. However, the research is clear that restricting food is actually one of the least helpful things we can do.

Part 5 of a 5-Part Series on Emotional Eating.

Episode Transcript:

If you have a history of dieting your whole life or a history of restricting your foods, and you also find yourself emotionally eating...welcome to the club.

INTRO MUSIC: Welcome to The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I'm Alex Treanor. I'm a Nationally Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and I am so excited you're here. The wellness industry is full of do's and do not's, should's and should not's. But I like to take a different approach. I'll be sharing all things health and wellness from a joyful, real-life compassionate perspective. If you're ready to drop the cookie-cutter approach and create a life you truly love, while eating a cookie or two along the way, let's dive in.

Hi, Friends! Welcome to today's episode of The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. This week we are wrapping up our five-part series on emotional eating.

One of the reasons that I decided to do this series is because, as a coach, one of the things that I feel really honored about is being able to hear people's inner thoughts about themselves and about their eating habits and about change and that process because it is a hard process. It's truly an honor to hear from my clients and from those I work with about the thoughts that go through their head throughout this process.

Something that I hear a lot of, especially with emotional eating, is self-criticism and harshness about the ability to change. There's a lot of frustration that we just can't seem to figure it out. And I get that; I have felt that way too and I still feel that way somedays!

My hope is that through exploring this topic as in depth as we have over these last five episodes, I hope that you have gained some understanding of how come you might use emotional eating or why you might use emotional eating. I hope that you know that you're not alone in it, and that it's very common, and that there are reasons that make sense, that are researched and evidence-based for why we use emotional eating. And I also hope that you've discovered some personal insights on what steps you want to take or where you might start if you're wanting to make changes. I hope that we have unraveled some of this complex web that is emotional eating and broken it down into pieces that feel more manageable or that makes sense.

As a brief summary, in the previous episodes, we have talked about managing stress and about regulating our emotions. We've talked about the importance of being self-compassionate, and thinking about our bodies in a positive way. The last factor that we'll be diving into today is our mentality or how we think about food, specifically how restricting our food can relate to emotional eating.

If you're listening to this the day that it releases, Happy Halloween! This is releasing on Halloween! I did save the food restriction episode for today on purpose. Not necessarily because it's scary to talk about food restriction. I think it's a topic people don't love talking about. But more so because Halloween feels like the kickoff to the holiday season, which is a time when food restriction is top of mind for a lot of people. The holidays are filled with food events. There's a lot of treats, more treats than usual. There's a lot of cultural or social gatherings. It's a time when food is very present in our lives. A time when even before the holidays come we're already thinking about how we will need to restrict. So that being said, it's a good time to be talking about food restriction and how it relates with emotional eating. And let's dive into that for today's episode.

There is actually a ton of research on this topic. So I just want to highlight three main things that we know that all the research seems to have in common.

First, we know that a higher level of food restriction is associated with higher levels of emotional eating. So the more that we restrict our food, the more we also emotionally eat.

Second, we know that more frequent dieting is associated with more emotional eating. So somebody who has dieted their entire life likely has more emotional eating tendencies than somebody who has never dieted in their life.

And the third thing that we know is that ruminating, which is repeating negative thoughts to ourselves, ruminating on our food choices makes these relationships even stronger.

Keep in mind that these are not causal relationships. Dieting and restricting your food don't cause you to emotionally eat, but they do play a very big role and there's a strong association when we're looking at the overall picture of emotional eating as we've done throughout this entire series.

And before we dive too much into restriction, I just really want to validate how frustrating this can be. And that this is probably not great news if it's the first time you're hearing this, because it is a vicious cycle. And we feel it.

Here's a little bit what the cycle looks like. So for one reason or another, we decide to restrict our food intake. Often this is done with the intention of changing our body size or our body shape, however, there are other reasons that people may choose to restrict their food as well. So we decide to restrict our food intake and eventually that backfires and we aren't able to stay as restricted as we want it to be. We catch ourselves overeating or emotionally eating in this case, and that blows the restriction out of the water. That pendulum swings. What happens then is that can possibly lead to a change in weight or shape, a change in the opposite direction of what you maybe were hoping for when you started trying to restrict your food. So we decide, "oh, I need to restrict even harder" and you start right back at that cycle again. It's essentially the diet cycle, right? We've heard of this. And it is so well researched. This is the reason why diets don't seem to last, because this cycle happens.

It's important to know that this is so common. So common. It's the focus of countless research studies, because it is so common and researchers want to understand how do we change this? Or how do we find ways to restrict that don't lead to emotional eating or overeating or binge eating?

All this to say that if you have a history of dieting your whole life, or a history of restricting your foods, and you also find yourself emotionally eating...welcome to the club. I feel like anybody who has restricted or been on a diet at any point in their life can relate with this feeling.

To give you an idea of some of the research that is out there, I figured we'd start with the foundational studies on food restriction. This was done by Peter Herman and Deborah Mack back in the 1970s. They had a group of participants, and they told the participants they were going to study how different tastes impact each other. So what they did was give some of the participants, they called it a preload, basically like an appetizer, and then have them taste three different kinds of ice cream and rate how the flavors interacted. That is what the participants were told, but really, what they were looking at is the amount of food that was going to be eaten in this.

So the three groups, the appetizers if you will, one group was given one milkshake, another group was given two milkshakes, and then the third group was given zero milkshakes (they had no appetizer, no preload). After they had that preload snack, they were given chocolate, strawberry, and a vanilla ice cream. They had to taste every ice cream, but they could eat as much as they wanted. So they had to have at least a bite of each, but they could eat however much they were inclined to eat.

After the participants were done with the eating part, they were also given a survey just looking at some of their eating habits, their history with dieting, how often they think about food, how guilty they feel if they tend to overeat, just getting a better understanding for how they feel and how they think about food. At the completion of the study, the researchers weighed the ice cream so they were able to determine how much of each ice cream was eaten by each participant.

It was anticipated that those who had more milkshake would eat less ice cream. If you've had two milkshakes, you're probably not going to want as much ice cream as possible, because you may already be full from having the milkshake. That was what they expected to see.

The actual results were a little bit different.

What they noticed is that based off of the surveys, the participants could be divided into two different groups, those who tended to restrict their eating (they called these restrained eaters) and those who didn't (they called these unrestrained eaters). What they found is that the unrestrained eaters, those who didn't restrict their food, they tended to have less ice cream if they had more milkshakes, exactly as what was expected. However, it was different for those who were restrained eaters. The people who had a history of dieting, who had a history of trying to restrict their food, what they saw with them is that they ate more ice cream, regardless of how many milkshakes they had. So they had two milkshakes and also a lot of ice cream, or they could have one milkshake and still a lot of ice cream. It didn't matter what the preload was.

A few years later, this study was then repeated, but a little bit different. So instead of the three groups, they had two groups. Each was given the same drink. It was a chocolate drink. that had 500 calories in it. They told one of the groups that it's a high calorie drink, and they told the other group that it was a low calorie drink. They gave similar surveys to figure out their eating behaviors, similar taste tests with the ice cream.

What they found with this group is that the high-restraint eaters, those who tended to restrict their food intake, when they thought that they were having a high calorie drink, they ate significantly more ice cream afterwards than when they thought they were having a low calorie drink, which was kind of backwards from what they expected. Those who thought that they had a lot of calories already ended up eating more ice cream.

In those who had low restriction, they tended to eat less ice cream when they thought they had had a high calorie drink. When they thought they had had a low calorie drink, they ate more ice cream.

So the theory that was put together from these different studies, is that when we are used to dieting, and we're used to restricting our food intake, what we're doing is relying on external cues for our eating. We're relying on diet culture, on the food rules, on what we feel like we should or shouldn't do, the do's and do nots of what we hear, or what we read in the media about nutrition. That becomes our guideline for how we eat. And when we feel stressed, or when we feel negative emotion, those rules don't matter anymore.

You don't care about diet rules, about not eating carbs, about reducing your sugar intake, when you've had a terrible day. You care about feeling better, and getting relief. And food helps with that. Even if it's temporarily, it does help with that. Our bodies and our minds are just trying to keep us going the best that we can. And using those external cues, we drop them. We dismiss them when we're feeling emotional, which is why there's a link with emotional eating.

Knowing all of this, we can also see how ruminating would play a role here too, because ruminating is when we repeatedly focus on these negative thoughts, and we keep coming back to them. So if we are stuck in that dieting, and now our external cues are gone, and we're feeling bad, and we're focused on how stressed we are, how stressed we are, how stressed we are...We turn to what has been helpful, which in this case, let's say is food. And that gives us the relief. But then what happens is then we start beating ourselves up for that more repeated negative thoughts for turning to food.

"Why can't I figure this out? What is wrong with me? Why am I the only person who can't seem to get their head on straight with this?"

It keeps us stuck. We know that when we're feeling those negative emotions, and we're continually thinking about it, that's going to increase our stress, like we talked about in part one. That's also going to make it harder to regulate our emotions, like we talked about in part two. We're not being self compassionate. We're probably getting down on our bodies, right? They're all so interconnected.

So what do we do with this one, with restriction? And with dieting? How do we start taking steps towards unwinding that? I think the answer here, it's really pulling together all the things that we've talked about so far.

To be able to decrease the restriction, we have to stop focusing on restriction. We have to stop focusing on dieting. We have to stop turning to dieting as the answer. When we want to stop emotional eating, dieting and food restriction are not the answer.

Instead, we have to learn to use our body cues, our internal body cues, the things that stay with us, even when we're feeling stressed. That when we're feeling stressed, and we can be mindful and we can pay attention, it will be able to help us navigate through those hard times.

We learn to stay mindful and stay present when eating. We learned to choose self-compassion over self-judgment. All of these things are learned practices. We, at some point, learned to diet. We learned that food restriction was the answer. Now it's a process of learning to undiet, or to do things differently. To find solutions that don't involve restriction.

To do this, you can practice unconditional permission, which is something we talked about in episode 20. I would also recommend using mindful eating skills. We talked about that in episode 12.

I would also keep in mind that often, we lean towards restriction when we're wanting to change our body shape or our body size. We know from last week that body image and how we feel about ourselves is a change that happens in our mind, not our body.

However, if you have reasons that you're wanting to change your body size or shape, that is also valid. And I would just say that you can do that without restriction. You can do that without dieting, you can honor your health and wellness goals without having to always focus on less. If this is something you're interested in, or not sure where to start with, I would love to book a call with you. I'm happy to chat about it, see if how I can best support you. There's a link in the show notes to book a call completely free.

So for this week, instead of having a question to ponder on, I'm going to give you a challenge. If you're listening to this on Halloween, I'm sure you have plenty of candy around. If not, if it's not Halloween, or you don't have candy around, I want to encourage you to find a small treat, something you can start with and practice mindfully eating it.

What this looks like is paying attention to your senses, maybe smelling it beforehand, looking at the texture, feeling it in your fingers. As you eat, you'll eat it slowly, you'll chew thoroughly. You'll pay attention to how the taste changes between the first bite and the third bite and the last bite. Also pay attention to how satisfying it is. Is it something you truly enjoy? Do you feel the same afterwards, as you did beforehand? Did it bring you joy? You can also be mindful of any of those automatic negative thoughts that may come up about how you shouldn't be eating this or how it's not good for you those types of things. Write them out. Maybe journaling them asking yourself if there's those are true. Asking yourself to find evidence.

If you need some guidance on how to approach this challenge, I did make you a free mindful eating guide that can help you with this. It teaches you all these skills that I just mentioned. I will also include a link in the show notes to that so that you can download that have it with you has some journaling pages for you, you'll be all set.

Alright, so as we are wrapping up this series, I just want to point out again, how interconnected all of these different factors are. It is a complex web. That's why it is hard to change our eating habits. If it were easy, we would all be able to do it. No problem. But it's not easy. So if you're having a hard time with it, it's hard because it's hard not because you're bad at it.

There is no perfect step by step plan for approaching emotional eating. Every person is different. Everyone has different things that impact them more or less. So I would encourage you as we're wrapping up this series to consider which topics resonated with you the most. Where do you feel most called to focus what you feel will have the biggest impact for you and focus on that first. No need to take it all in all at the same time. Focus on one step at a time.

That is what I've got for you today. Thank you so much for joining me on this emotional eating adventure over the last five episodes. I have so loved hearing your thoughts and experiences and all the conversations that we've had. I hope that you continue to send me your thoughts and feedbacks. I'm always interested to hear from you and chat with you and love on you and let you know how awesome I think you are. I hope that you have a wonderful week this week and I look forward to talking with you again next week.

OUTRO MUSIC: Thanks for joining me on this episode of the compassionate wellness podcast. If this message resonated with you, please share it with someone you care about. I'd love to connect with you as well follow me on Instagram @alextreanor.coaching, or visit my website alextreanorcoaching.com. And as a reminder, Treanor spelled kind of goofy, it's T-R-E-A-N-O-R. For any references mentioned in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to make time for something you enjoy.

References:

• Herman, C.P. & Mack, D. (1975). Restrained and unrestrained eating. Journal of Personality, 43(4), 647-660/

• Mantau, A., Hattula, S., & Bornemann, T. (2018). Individual determinants of emotional eating: A simultaneous investigation. Appetite, 130, 93-103.

• Van Strien, T., Konttinen, H.M., Ouwens, M.A., van de Laar, F.A., & Winkens, L.H.H. (2020). Mediation of emotional and external eating between dieting and food intake or BMI gain in women. Appetite, 145, 104493.

• Spencer, J. A., & Fremouw, W. J. (1979). Binge eating as a function of restraint and weight classification. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88(3), 262.

• Waliłko, J., Bronowicka, P., He, J., & Brytek-Matera, A. (2021). Dieting and disinhibited eating patterns in adult women with normal body weight: Does rumination matter?. Nutrients, 13(7), 2475.

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9471519/#:~:text=Restraint%20theory%20(Herman%20and%20Polivy,et%20al.%2C%202012)