Remove Restrictions

If this is your first time tuning in, please check out 

Episode 1 to hear my story. 

Episode 2 outlined the 8 reasons why you binge.

Episode 3 covered the solutions for each reason, highlighting the eight things you must do to stop binge eating.

Episode 4 was a deep dive into the #1 solution for how to stop binge eating by understanding why you binge. 

In this episode I dive deeper into the #2 reason why we binge and how to stop it.  

I provide you with additional insight into how people unintentionally keep themselves in the pattern of binge eating. 

There are two types of restrictions we create for ourselves. Physical and emotional restrictions. 

Tune in to hear why and how you need to remove both types of restrictions that cause you to binge eat.  

Stay tuned for a deeper dive into the remaining 6 solutions to stop binge eating.

If you would like to download the 8 reasons why you binge and what to do about it, visit www.BingeBreakthrough.com/why 

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Binge Breakthrough, a podcast designed to help you finally break through the barriers that keep you stuck, feeling out of control about food. I'm Master Certified Coach Jane Hoker, and I want you to know that no matter how long you've been struggling or what you've tried, food freedom is awful. I'm here to show you how. Each week I will share the strategies, tools, and mindset that allowed me to overcome my decades-long battle with binge eating. Your journey to body trust starts now. Let's dive in. Hello, trusted listener. Welcome to episode five of Binge Breakthrough. I call you a trusted listener because trust is such an important part of the work that I do. I am so passionate about helping people develop trust with themselves, trust with their bodies. And I trust that you are in the right place listening to this podcast and that you are going to get something out of this podcast that is going to help you on your journey to food freedom. I trust that you are going to hear something either in a new way, or maybe you're going to hear something that you've never heard before that you will be able to take into your life today so that you can apply what you're learning and so that you can work on building that trust with yourself. So I'm recording this episode one week after the initial launch of this podcast. And I am just thrilled with the number of downloads that we've had so far, with the feedback that I am getting. And I just want you to know we are just getting started. If you have not gone back and listened to the previous episodes, uh, here's a little recap for you. In the first episode, I shared my story just so that you can understand a little bit about who I am and why I get it, I understand, and that I am um just capable to talk to you about this subject. I also talked a little bit about what I mean when I talk about binging. Sometimes people don't really know what binging is or what that means when I talk about binging. So I do cover that in the first episode. And then in episode two, I highlighted the eight reasons why I people I see that people are stuck in the pattern of binging. And then in episode three, I highlighted the eight solutions to those reasons, essentially how to stop. So all eight reasons of how to stop. If you have not listened to that, it's a great overview for you. And what we're gonna do here is we are gonna continue the deep dive into the answers of how you stop binge eating. So today we are talking about the number two solution to stopping binge eating, and that is removing restrictions. Solution number two, remove restrictions. Now, a lot of people know about this topic, but so many people actually end up using it against themselves. So I'm hoping to just provide a little additional insight. Maybe you can see how uh you might have accidentally, unintentionally been using this against yourself to kind of keep you in that pattern. So let's go ahead and dive in. There are two types of restriction: there is physical restriction and mental or emotional restriction. So when we talk about removing restrictions and that being one of the solutions to stopping binge eating, we need to remove both the physical and the mental restrictions. So let's just start with talking about physical restrictions. Physical restriction is really any attempt to eat less food. So the perfect example of physical restriction is going to be a diet, right? We're trying to eat less food. It happens, physical restriction happens when we are eating less food than our body needs. Now, this can happen with quantities of foods, or it can happen when we eliminate food groups, or even when we try to only eat in certain windows. So, for example, intermittent fasting, where you have a window you don't eat between certain hours of the day. Maybe you are trying to not snack. That is another method and component of physical restriction. So, one of the things that happens with physical restriction is that the person is often disregarding their hunger signal signals, cravings, or even other signs from the body that it's time to eat. My favorite example of the physical and emotional impacts of physical restriction is the Minnesota, the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. So if you haven't heard about this, I will give you kind of a brief summary of what happened, but it's fascinating. And if you are interested in this, you can Google and find all kinds of information about this experiment. But basically, what happened was there's this guy by the name of Ansel Keys, and he did this study, it was back in 1944. And what they were trying to do is they were trying to, they were looking at the effects of starvation on uh men and who were in in war times, semi-starvation, really. And what they were looking at is okay, how do we most appropriately and healthfully re-feed and rehabilitate these soldiers who come back from war who have been in a semi-starvation state? What is the best way for us to take care of, to take care of them and to bring them back to health and nourishment? So, in order to figure out the best way to rehabilitate them, they actually had to create starvation or semi-starvation conditions for them. So they had uh 36 healthy young men who were a part of the study. The study lasted for a year. They spent the first part of the study, they basically were um just all uh given a baseline number of calories to make sure they were getting very good and healthy nutrients, and they were given a level of calories that would maintain their weight. Then they went through a period of time where they were, they went into the semi-starvation period. And this during the semi-starvation period, they were uh they were given like 1600 calories a day, which for them was a significant decrease. But 1600 calories, some people might think like, wow, that's actually a lot of food. Well, it shows you just how many calories we actually need to be eating to sustain our bodies, unlike what the magazines and other things would would have us to say. So they went through this period of semi-starvation, and the impacts were remarkable. So, in addition, they had quite a few um physical and physiological impacts of the semi-starvation. Their weights went down, most of them went down about 25% in their body weight. And what was fascinating were some of the emotional impacts. So these men, they were fixated on food. They became um literally fixated on food. They were, they were exploring, looking at recipes. Um, three of them actually ended up after the study, three of them ended up going into careers uh in food. They changed their careers. I think two of them became chefs, and one of them uh was doing something in uh farming or something like that. Um, and some of these, they were staying up late, trading recipes. They were just obsessed with food. When they ate, sometimes they would extend the period of time for eating. So they would kind of like try to spread their food out, try to make it last longer. They started chewing so much gum. Um, they started smoking cigarettes, things that they didn't do before to try to kind of stave off some of the hunger that they were experiencing. They also um they just had a lot of different obsessions. They became very fixated on their food. When they were eating, they would um they would get, they would eat every single morsel off their plate. Sometimes they would even like lick their plate clean, and they would get very upset when they saw other people who were not in the same experiment who would throw away or waste food. So it was really a very fascinating experience. And then in during the refeeding period, there were they were often eating significant amounts of calories, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of calories, uh, during the times when they were not um uh maintained in terms of uh the the amount of food they were eating was not when it was when it was kind of open. They ate a tremendous amount of food. Sometimes they would also force themselves to vomit because they ate so much food. Really, there were so many things that happened within this experiment that very much uh mirror what we see in uh several eating disorders, in anorexia, in bulimia, and in binge eating disorder. And all of this stemmed from the restriction, the semi-starvation that they were undergoing. And some of these obsessions for these men continued for months, and for some of them, even years after the refeeding process. So if you are in this situation where you have um, let's say you've stopped dieting, but you still kind of feel crazy around food sometimes, um, or let's say you have had an eating disorder and you've been kind of you've been through that re-feeding renourishment process, but still you feel feel kind of crazy around food sometimes. This makes sense. This is kind of part of the process from of what our bodies do and how our bodies react when we have been through any sort of um semi-starvation, perceived starvation from the body. So a lot, and I would venture to say most binge eating starts following a period of extreme or extended restriction, which often happens in the form of a diet. So I'd like for you listening right now to think back. Think back to when you started binging. Was there restriction leading up to it? Like think about when you started binging and then what was happening before that time. For some people, um, that restriction may have come from your parents. If binging started at a very young age when you were sneaking food, for a lot of people, the restriction came directly from their parents, where they were um not given certain amounts of food or they were restricted from eating certain things. Sometimes it's self-imposed restriction. Maybe it was a diet you went on when you were uh in school, something like that. For me, my first binge was my first year in college. And leading up to that first year in college, I had spent about a year really counting calories, going to the gym, trying to lose this amount of weight that I had gained in high school. And I got this great sense of pleasure and control in doing these things, in counting the calories and going to the gym and trying to lose the weight and doing all of these things. Now, I also had some other emotional needs that weren't addressed that I think were a part of the binging, but I am certain that the intense restriction was the catalyst for my own binging. Another thing that's super common is for bodybuilders or people who have been in, say, a bikini or a figure competition, after that competition goes, it they very there can be a very high amount of uh binge eating that happens out after that because there is very legit physical restriction that happens through the diet and getting your weight down to that amount of a body fat. Also happens often in gymnasts, in runners, or really in any sport where your body and your weight are closely monitored. It's very common for eating disorders to develop for that reason. So the thing we can remember is the brain's main job is survival. So if you aren't feeding it enough food, it's going to perceive that it's its livelihood is at risk. It is going to perceive that it is, it is going is under famine, that starvation is happening. So it will make sure that it gets the food no matter how that happens. So it's exactly what we saw with the Minnesota starvation experience. The brain became hyper-focused on food when it would get it, where, when the opportunity was there, it would force feed it as much as possible because the brain doesn't know if starvation is coming again. It's this protective mechanism mechanism to make sure that the body will survive. So, can you see how this makes sense? How dieting and the restricting it sets the brain up to think that its survival might be at risk. So then it has to get as much food as possible. Your brain, your body is literally just doing its job, which is to keep you alive. Now, there is also a very real, the very real phenomenon of food scarcity. Let's say you literally do not have the resources to meet your food needs, this can also create physical restriction. This can also be why, if you had food scarcity at any point growing up, if food was not available to you for any reason, whether it was withheld from you because somebody thought you weighed too much, or whether it wasn't available to you because of your financial means, or because of your uh whatever your situation was in terms of availability, the brain still sees that as a risk and a threat to its survival. So there are a lot of people who went through food true food scarcity as a child who have a lot of um, the brain really wants to make sure that food is always going to be available. So it makes sense. It's one of those things we can really look and see, oh, okay, the brain is always just trying to keep us alive. It's always trying to protect us, it's trying to do something for us at all times. And if that's if starvation is occurring, if the body is not getting what it needs physically, what happens is the brain, it's going to crave the most calorie-dense options to get more energy to the body. And this is why when we get, we've all experienced this time where let's say you just get particularly hungry for whatever reason, let's, whether it was intentional or not, when you have these ex when you get extreme hunger, what happens is that the body knows it needs food right away. And so it's going to start craving the higher density, higher caloric items so that it can get the energy that it needs. It makes so much sense. The other thing is that if your brain has experienced the trauma of starvation, now, this trauma of starvation can happen through any sort of physical restriction, whether it was you unintentionally did it through dieting, whether it happened through other food scarcity. What happens is the next time that you're underfed, the brain is going to be on high alert. It's going to be more primed to react because it knows what that what that experience of starvation, semi-starvation was like before. And it does not want to repeat that. And so this is why, for those of us who have either undergone extreme amounts of starvation or extreme amounts where food was not available, when we try to go through that um restriction again, or you go on try to go on another diet, and your brain just all of a sudden freaks out and you find yourself eating a lot more. This is why. It's kind of the brain is just on high alert because it knows what it has experienced in the past. It does not want to go through that starvation again. So here's another thing about physical restriction. It can also happen when we don't allow ourselves to eat at certain times, or if we don't allow ourselves to eat certain foods or even categories of foods. So, intermittent fasting, for example. Let's say the typical window is uh you eat from 10 in the morning until six o'clock in the evening. Now, a lot of people who try intermittent fasting, they're so hungry by the time their eating window starts that they end up eating way more food than they might normally eat if they had open access to food during the day. Now, I want to be clear, I am not throwing intermittent fasting under the bust, but I think everyone should make their own choices regarding food, what they eat, when they eat, how much to eat, based upon their own body. But if you are doing intermittent fasting in an attempt to lose weight and you're experiencing physical hunger during the times you're not allowed to eat, this is the hallmark of physical restriction. There is a large correlation between people who do or attempt to do intermittent fasting and binge eating. I want to say something. If you there are, I've heard a lot people say, oh, I tried intermittent fasting and I felt great, except for when I was binging. Now that does not mean that intermittent fasting worked. If something works, it means it works over the long term. It means it's sustainable, it means you can do it for the long term, and it doesn't have the negative impacts. Some people do succeed with intermittent fasting, but I find that if you have a history of binge eating or you have a history of disordered eating in any way, intermittent fasting can really exacerbate the behavior because it is the kind of that hallmark of physical restriction. Now, let's talk about food groups. So some people try to avoid sugar and flour, maybe they try to avoid processed foods. The only way you can know how this impacts you is how you feel about your choices and also what your results are. So some people they they choose not to eat these things because maybe they have an allergy or maybe there's a negative response in their body and they love their reason. They're confident in the choice, they don't end up eating behind their own back or binging on these things that give them a negative reaction. And they are also generally eating enough food to satisfy their physical needs as a human, as a human person. So, for example, for me, I don't eat very much fried food or spicy food because it makes my tummy hurt. I eat plenty of other foods and my physical needs are being met. So it's not restriction, it's a good choice. Once upon a time, I decided I was gonna stop eating sugar and flour, and I was gonna stop snacking. So I did this with the ultimate goal of stopping binging and also to lose weight. This was physical restriction. I wasn't eating enough overall for my body's needs. And I wasn't eating sugar and flour because I thought it was bad for me. But I really was eating a lot of sugar and flour because I would binge quite frequently because I had both the physical and the mental restriction happening at the same time. So there's another kind of component of restriction, and that is intentional versus unintentional restriction. Now, this one really. Got me. And honestly, it still does at times. So unintentional restriction is when you think you're eating enough food for your needs, but for various reasons, you might not be. So this happens for me. Like if I miss a meal based on just having a busy schedule, or when I'm in heavy training with my athletic endeavors. So I might notice that when I do, like I just want to keep eating, or that it takes a lot of food that I think it should to satisfy me. And I can look back and be like, oh, I think I was unintentionally restricting. I didn't necessarily notice that I was hungry and I was like ignoring my hunger signals. I wasn't trying to like just drink tea or coffee to avoid, uh, you know, avoid eating or push something off till, you know, until it was time to eat again. Those are kind of hallmarks of intentional physical restriction. But for me, it's kind of like I don't even realize it. And then I can look back and I can see in my how I am behaving with food, I can see, oh, there must have been some unintentional restriction going on there. And in my athletics, this is something I've really had to learn. I've had to learn how to fuel like an athlete. And if I want to compete on that high level, I need to eat on a high level also. And I have just learned that for me personally, I don't skip meals. I can see a pattern. And I think it is because of my uh my past kind of history that when I skip meals, number one, I generally don't eat as much during the day. And number two, I think my body kind of gets that message. Is starvation coming again? Is is a diet coming? Is restriction coming? And it will kind of backlash against that. So I just have a general policy that I just generally don't skip meals. Now it is not black and white, it is not a rule, but I know that if I do, um, I just need to really pay attention to what's going on and make sure that I am eating enough to fuel my needs and so that my body feels very safe and knows that food is coming. So we really need to just know that if there is that long history of restriction or dieting, that the body can react much more quickly to restriction or even pending restriction. So the idea of pending restriction is fascinating because it's this idea. Most of you have probably had this experience where let's say you just start to think about losing weight. Oh, you know what? I think I really just need to, I need to go on a diet. I need to like get um, you know, get get things under control. Then all of a sudden, you may not have even made any choices yet or even done anything differently, but your brain is like, oh, it's coming. Pending restriction is coming. We are not going there. And it can respond by going into a binge. This is why when you were younger, you might have been able to be on a diet longer, to kind of uh, you know, go maybe weeks, maybe even months on a diet, really kind of controlling your food, controlling your intake before you would start either binging or eating whatever. And now, if you've been doing this for a long time, the amount of time that you're actually able to be in any sort of period of restriction uh gets to be much, much shorter. And for some people who have been through a lot, many, many cycles of the restrict binge cycle, the body is just, it just won't, it won't even go there in terms of the restriction. Now, what can happen also with physical restriction is that if you binge, there can be a very natural response to after a binge to want to restrict in order to try to make up for what happened with the binge. And so then it's like, okay, well, I'm not gonna eat the next day. Uh, I'm not gonna eat at all, or I'm only gonna eat uh uh juice. I'm only gonna have juice to try to cleanse my body, whatever it is, that ends up setting yourself up for more restriction, which then sets you up for more of a binge. It ends up being this cycle. Another great visual for the binge restrict cycle is the idea of looking, think about it as a pendulum. So a pendulum that's gonna swing back and forth and back and forth. So if you restrict, let's say the restriction is generally the first swing of the pendulum, then it's gonna swing the other way with a binge. And then if in response to the binge we restrict, then your pendulum is gonna go back and it's gonna keep swinging back and forth and back and forth, which is why this is such a key component of stopping binging, is we have to stop the restrictions, not only the physical restriction, which means as far as after a binge, not trying to compensate or to make up for any additional calories that were eaten. It's also then looking at the mental restriction. So, mental restriction, it's the restriction that takes place in your mind. It is the rules, the rules we have around food. So maybe it's uh forbidden foods, maybe it is thinking that foods, certain foods are bad. Um, it also sounds like uh don't eat too much. Uh, it sounds like I've already blown it, so I might as well eat all of this. It sounds like I'm not gonna get this again, so I'm gonna eat as much as I can right now. It sounds like I'll be good starting tomorrow. Or it might even sound like this. Well, I'm eating this one particular food now, so I can't eat it again later today. So think about it. If you're eating something right now and you expect that you can't have it later in that day, you're more likely to binge on it or to overeat on it in that moment because you're anticipating you're not going to be allowed to eat it later. When you have forbidden foods, foods that you're not allowed to eat, when you don't have permission to eat what you want when you want. This is the mental restriction. The thing that's interesting about mental restriction is mental restriction really creates a scarcity mindset. It makes us think that food is in scarce supply. And when something is in scarce supply, what do we want to do? We want to hoard it. We want more of it. We want to make sure we can get as much as we can because we don't know if we're going to be able to get it in the future. This is exactly what happens with food. When it's like, oh, well, I don't usually eat cookies, I wasn't going to eat any cookies and I just ate one. Well, now I might as well eat the whole box because after this, I'm not going to be able to eat cookies again. It's that scarcity mindset. It makes us want to eat more and more and to hoard it while we can get it. It's exactly what was happening in the Minnesota Starvation Experience experiment. Also, when they had access to food, they would gorge on it because they didn't know when they were going to get it again. So one of the analogies I love to use with scarcity and food scarcity or just the scarcity mindset we can create in our minds with food is toilet paper. Think about toilet paper in the beginning of the pandemic. We all know toilet paper was in scarce supply. And what did we do? We went out, we were all trying to buy toilet paper. When you could find it, you would buy as much as you could. I remember buying toilet paper that was scratchy and terrible and gross because I was so afraid that I wasn't going to be able to find any other toilet paper. Now, I had plenty of toilet paper, it was all fine, but it's such a prime, it's such a great example of what mental restriction and that scarcity mindset can do for us with that, and how you can see that it creates the cycle and it keeps us in that cycle of binging. Okay, so what do we do? How do we remove these restrictions? First of all, we have to create an abundance mindset. This mindset sounds like all foods are available, all foods are permissible. Now, I want to be very clear. This is not, this does not equal a free for all and just go eat all the food just without any regard for anything else. So when I talk about abundance, I mean abundance in availability and abundance in possibility, but not in quantity of food. So you have the permission to eat anything you want, but it's not permission to disconnect from yourself. This is where people get in trouble. How many times have I heard, oh, I tried intuitive eating, but then I gained 50 pounds. And so then I felt terrible. And then I went back to dieting. And then now I'm just back in this cycle of where I'm trying to control my food. I know I can't diet, but I also know that when I just let myself have permission to eat, I just eat like nonstop. I don't think that those are the only two options. I don't think the only options are diet or gain 50 pounds and eat all of the things. What I think is important and what most people lose out on is the focusing on the connection, the energy. How do you feel when you eat these foods? That is part of the process of creating this abundance, really looking at removing your food rules. So in looking at removing your food rules, it's very important you can make a list. Make a list of all of your rules around food, like I don't eat after 7 p.m., or I don't snack, or I don't eat certain foods, uh, I only have dessert on special occasions. And go through and evaluate how each one feels. Why do you have this rule? Do you like your rule or would you like it to be different? If you had a peaceful relationship with food, would you need or want this rule? Do the same thing with all of the foods you don't allow yourself to eat, whether it's at all or even very often. Ask yourself, why don't you eat these foods? Would you like to eat them regularly if you weren't concerned about how they might impact you? What sort of relationship would you like to have with this food? So often we've given the food the power over us. We think we can't have ice cream in the house because we can't trust ourselves. We become powerless over ice cream. But the truth is, ice cream doesn't do anything. The key is what you are telling yourself while you're eating the ice cream. Are you saying you shouldn't be eating it? You're disgusting, you have no control, don't eat too much. Or are you enjoying it and noticing the flavors and the textures? Or maybe you're just completely checked out and there's no thought going on at all. It's very likely that some form of physical or mental restriction preceded the bout with the ice cream. So here's the overall approach to removing restriction. It's planning satisfying and balanced meals, eating at regular intervals, incorporating your fear foods, removing the rules, the restrictions that you have around it. So I want you to just get curious. After you've listened to all of this, how and where does a restriction show up for you? Is it possible you aren't eating enough for your physical needs? Now, I don't recommend counting calories, macros, or using any outside source to tell you what or how much to eat. I encourage you to get in touch with your hunger and your fullness cues to allow them to guide you. If you've been disconnected from yourself for a long time, this can be a process that is best worked through with someone else. And especially if you are actively going through uh eating disorder, if you are actively going through some semi-starvation, this is best done with support. But I want you to get curious about whether this might be true for you. Are you ignoring hunger signals? Are you really active, but you're not eating a lot? Are you trying to do things like drink coffee and tea to stave off hunger or delay your eating? And what's your relationship with hunger? Now that's a fascinating question that can and will be its own episode. But for now, just get curious where might physical and mental restriction be at play in your own personal relationship with food? And how can you start taking small steps to remove restriction while also staying connected with yourself? All right, that's what I have for you today. Stay tuned next week, where we are gonna dive in to the next answer on how to stop binge eating. And we are gonna dive into one of my favorite topics, which is discussing the nervous system. How to use your nervous system to stop binge eating. Stay tuned. Thank you for listening to Binge Breakthrough. If you would like to download the eight reasons why you binge and what to do about it, visit binge breakthrough.com forward slash why. That's binge breakthrough.com forward slash W H Y. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast so that you don't miss any future episodes that will dive deeper into how to create lasting food freedom. I'll see you there.