By Kathleen Bishop, LCSW

Therapist and Intuitive Eating Coach

Many people believe that certain foods make them binge. What if I told you that it's not actually the food, but the restriction of that food that leads to feeling out of control and eating past full?

It's like a rubber band.

Each time you deny yourself a forbidden food that band gets stretched

until finally you snap and eat way more than intended to the point of being uncomfortably full. You end up vowing never to do that again, only to wind up doing the same thing over and over.

I have worked with and talked to hundreds of people who were convinced it was the food that caused them to be out of control, rather than the restriction of said food. Once they allowed forbidden foods to be fully unrestricted, they became less out of control with that food. This is a part of Intuitive Eating (IE) and why intuitive eating is set apart from Mindful Eating.

Unconditional permission to at is one of the essential tenets of IE. When you have physical (don’t keep it in the house) and/or mental (it’s a bad food) restrictions around food, it keeps those restricted foods in a heightened state in your brain. So, your brain perceives them as more rewarding than they actually are.

So, what do you do,

Try an experiment with one food. For example, if you like cookies, pick your favorite. Then stock some boxes of those cookies in your home. Allow yourself to eat them whenever you really want them. For most people, after roughly four to six days, the magic happens. They no longer feel that out of control feeling. The goal is not to make of yourself sick of your favorite cookies, rather it is to habituate your brain to not feel out of control when they are in the house.

The reason for choosing your favorite of a particular food (cookies, ice cream, chips), and doing this with one restricted food at a time, is because it would likely overwhelm you to experiment with a variety of food in each category you usually feel out of control with.

***Do not try this experiment if you have an active eating disorder. Please seek treatment.

With body, peace and liberation,

Kathleen Bishop, LCSW