Legalize it

The 3rd principle in "10 Principles of Intuitive Eating" is Make Peace with Food. 

As someone who has explored the field of nutrition for the past six years, I know that food is a loaded topic. I know vegans who adhere strictly to their diet for animal rights and ecological reasons. I know people on ketogenic (aka little to no carbohydrates) diets that have quite possibly saved their lives. The Paleo diet sometimes seems as controversial as the latest immigration legislation between Republicans and Democrats. 

Food is absolutely political and charged. So, it's no surprise when I have clients coming to me with years and years of food beliefs deeply ingrained.  "Pizza is bad." "Salads are good." "French fries are bad for you but whole baked potatoes are good." "You shouldn't really eat cookies but you should have smoothies." 

So what do you do? 

 It's not that different from what I told you last week:

EAT.  Legalize it. Make all foods legal. Make all foods neutral. 

Eat the foods that you've forbidden yourself to eat in all your years of dieting. 

For those of you freaking out right now, KEEP READING!

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch describe this in detail in the their book, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works: 

 "Psychologist Fritz Heider stated that depriving yourself of something you want can actually heighten your desire for that very item. The moment you banish a food, it paradoxically builds up a 'craving life' of its own that gets stronger with each diet, and builds more momentum as the deprivation deepens. Deprivation is a powerful experience both biologically and psychologically," (Tribole & Resch, 75).  

In other words, your low-carb diet is like Eve in the Garden of Eden. As long as you can't eat that piece of bread on the Tree of Forbidden Carbohydrates, you will increase your feeling of deprivation and desire for that piece of bread. This will impact you on a biochemical and psychological level.  

The book also describes the "see-saw syndrome" of deprivation and guilt. At a certain point, our willpower runs out and we end up overeating the very thing we've been trying to avoid.  

To banish any guilt or deprivation you might be feeling, here's my story: 

I went on a pretty serious "28 day challenge" where I was eating a vegan, whole foods, no oil, low salt, low sugar diet. And I did it for 27 of those 28 days (one day I indulged with some oil in my vegetable soup), including a small bout of stomach flu. I lost about 5 pounds.

However, I also had a building obsession with macaroni and cheese. Like, it was all I could think about. I tried eating the "28 day challenge" version of it, which tasted good but didn't satisfy me like the genuine, ooey-gooey article. So, at the end of what I later called "Vegan Ramadan," I ate  an inordinate amount of macaroni and cheese,even though my stomach was curdling in response to it. 

I ate SO much macaroni and cheese that I actually gained back a lovely 10 pounds.  (See my other blog post for more information about why diets don't work).

But the truth is, I got over the macaroni and cheese because of a lovely thing Tribole and Resch call, HABITUATION. In laymen's terms, habituation is the process of you eating something so many times that you eventually get sick of it - kind of like the latest Taylor Swift single.

To explain habituation, I love to tell the story I heard from Geneen Roth during my training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN). 

In her lecture, she describes a transformative experience when she went from battling a very serious eating disorder to drawing a line in the sand and choosing never to diet again. She notes that for two weeks she ate nothing but cookie dough.

That's right, folks, she allowed herself to have all the cookie dough she wanted. And you know what she discovered? After those two weeks, she didn't want cookie dough anymore. Her body started to crave salad, fresh fruits and vegetables. 

And that's just it: when you stop treating a vanilla milkshake like Olivia Pope treats the President, you'll actually probably feel less inclined to secretly binge on it. 

Honor Your Hunger, Fool.

Since last week I wrote about "rejecting the diet mentality," I thought it fitting to keep going along with the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating which you can read a summary of here. 

This is some food that I ate one time when I was hungry. 

This is a big step for chronic dieters, myself included, but it's one of the most liberating experiences of adjusting to a more intuitive eating style. I'll never forget starting yet another diet in college and literally googling, "how to not eat when you're hungry." I'll never forget those words that seemed to bound off the page at me. "When you're dieting, you're going to be hungry. You just have to learn how to live with that feeling if you want to lose weight."

YIKES!!! I could go off on a tangent about thinspiration and ALL the problems that we as women, men, and transgender individuals develop out of hearing a biological and urgent need from the body and resisting it. We don't really do that with breathing or with peeing so I don't know why we insist on it when it comes to food.  However, beyond the problematic social and political implications, honoring your hunger is good for you. 

Here's my evidence: 

1. Your body is smart. Listen to it. 

I'm stealing these lines from my Whole Foods Market Wellness Club days but the human body is literally engaging in thousands of chemical reactions simultaneously. Even though medicine and biological science have come extremely far, we understand as much about how the human body works as an average person knows about rocket science. Prescription drugs often isolate 1-2 chemical reactions to treat a given symptom. I like to use the story of Viagra as an example for this because it was originally being tested as a drug to lower blood pressure.  But then of course you know the rest of that story.... 

So, when it comes to eating, your body knows better than the latest fad diet. Because it's smarter than even some of the best and most well-paid scientists out there. And YOUR body will give you unique clues on how to feed YOUR body. 

2. Restricting Food can actually lead to a binge. 

This is something we often discussed at the eating disorder treatment center where I used to work. Ancel Keys study is most famous for proving that restriction can actually physiologically lead to a binge. You can read a quick excerpt about that here. 

You can't trick the body into eating less food. The human body wants to achieve homeostasis. When you restrict calories all day long as many do while on a diet, when you get home, you want to eat everything that isn't nailed down in your house. This goes the same for all you lunch skippers out there. I know your TPS report is important, but if you skip lunch, that makes you a lot more likely to end up eating a burger for dinner even though you planned to eat salmon and quinoa salad. Your body will be begging you to make up for the caloric deficit. By eating before we are ravenously hungry, we actually set ourselves up to eat better food. 

I'm definitely guilty of this here. When I used to have a more rigorous day job, I would often eat a light lunch that I had diligently packed the night before. I would most likely end up working late and ordering seamless on my way home because I was STARVING which usually meant the only thing that would satisfy was fried chicken and french fries. 

3. When you restrict food, you can slow down your metabolism more. 

Ancel Keys also proved this is his starvation experiment that our basal metabolic rate slows down during prolonged periods of starvation.

As many of the chronic dieters of the world know, even when you're perfect with your diet and you willpower your way through, eventually you plateau because your body figured it out and is working tirelessly to keep you alive. I've been through this myself.  An RD put me on a 1200 calorie diet that helped me lose 4 pounds but after about 3 months, I was stuck. Eventually I gave up and sprang back up to what I affectionately call my "happy weight." 

While I often tell my clients to avoid paying attention to the scale, listening to my body, eating when I'm hungry and stopping when I'm full (that's a whole other blog post), has helped me lose weight. More importantly than that, I don't have to spend so much time researching my meals and my diet and my weight is pretty stable without me even having to think about it. 

For real, eating should be like breathing. Just do it when you body says so. 

Can you blame your parents for your cravings?

 The short answer to this question is YES. 

But.... sometimes it's a good thing. 

One thing I discuss a lot with my clients is cravings. I don’t think cravings are necessarily bad. It’s one way that our body communicates to us, since it doesn't really speak English (or Spanish for that matter).

My nutrition school calls one cause of cravings, "the inside coming out." In other words, our past and our memories can call us to eat certain foods. 

Here's an example from a Disney classic, Ratatouille.

*Spoiler Alert. I'm talking about the end of the movie*

One of my favorite scenes in Ratatouille is when the little mouse triumphs . The food critic gives a positive review because the mouse's traditional peasant dish reminds him of his boyhood. 

(If you want to get really nerdy, this is actually a concept we learn from Marcel Proust known as involuntary memory.)

Food can taste better because it came from home. Or maybe it was forbidden when you were growing up and so it becomes all the more alluring. 

The  holiday season is certainly a time when we call to memory our past and our rituals that we have had in previous years. It's a time of year where we eat certain foods because of the day.

So as you festivate through the Christmahanakwanzika season, pay attention to which foods call your name. Why do you want them? I know I suddenly start hankering for copious amounts of sugar cookies because of happy memories of fun-shaped cookies and frosting. 

There's a  subtle shift to make when we notice these cravings happening. Realize WHY you're craving sweet things. It could be something simple like because you're blood sugar is low but it could also be that you're missing home or someone or a memory.

 Do your best to attend to the REAL motivation behind your craving. If you're looking for love, get a hug from a friend or a kiss from your partner. If you're missing home, call home.

But sometimes, it can work as well to bake those cookies yourself and relive that experience.  

Just remember you don't have to eat all the cookies to experience that memory. 

*** For more information about cravings or if you need help with your holiday cravings, I'm currently taking clients now and throughout the holiday****