Tag Archive for: food restriction

Rebound Eating- What is it & how do I stop?

You may have heard the term “rebound eating” and find yourself asking “what is this”?

 

In a nutshell, when you restrict the foods you really enjoy eating until you’ve reaching a your breaking point, the backlash is rebound eating.

 

Think of it as your body’s last ditch effort to get your attention after you’ve decided to ignore what it’s trying to tell you—it’s also saying, “Hey! You’re seriously depriving me over here!”

 

As a chronic dieter, rebound eating is something you may have experienced in the past. Does this cycle sound familiar?

 

Reducing the number of calories you consume to less than what your body needs > deprive, deprive, deprive > hit a wall where you can’t take the deprivation anymore and your restriction takes a nose dive > binge, binge, binge > compensate with intense exercise—“I need to work this off!”> REPEAT!

 

This common cycle is harmful to your physical and mental health, and truly take a toll on your body. It leads to disordered eating patterns, and if not responded to immediately could lead to other health complications (i.e., dehydration, brittle hair/nails, fatigue, brain fog, and more).

 

How to Stop Rebound Eating

 

The only way to put an end to this cycle of rebound eating is to stop the restriction. That means to stop dieting. So what is the alternative you might ask?

 

Intuitive eating!

 

Making peace with food and giving yourself full permission to eat while connecting to your inner wisdom to guide you is the way to stop this destructive cycle. When you embrace intuitive eating and bring all foods back into your eating world, you no longer obsess about those foods.

 

Intuitive eating is a practice you are cultivating, and it’s a lifelong journey (it’s not a quick fix!). If you truly want to end the cycle of restriction-deprivation-rebound eating/binge eating – repeat, then consider committing to stop dieting.

 

Pop your name and email into the boxes below for a free experience to Break the Spell of Diets in 3 Days.

 

Want more? Join an amazing supportive community of women inside my membership called The Intuitive Nutrition Circle (aka The IN Circle) where the are learning to integrate gentle nutrition into their intuitive eating practice. Click here for all the deets.

Overcoming Your Fear of Bread

Food fear, it’s a real thing. If you’ve been on and off diets over the years, losing and gaining the same weight repeatedly, you probably have some food fear. And this fear is driven by diet culture messages. Most restrictive weight loss diets ban bread, or severely restrict bread. This sets you up to believing that if you eat bread, you’re going to gain weight.

I recently met a lovely woman at a party. I didn’t know her, she’s my friend’s friend but we got along quickly, almost as if we knew each other for years. Where do you think the conversation went?

“Oh, I hear you’re a nutritionist. I’ve recently lost 20 pounds. I’m trying so hard not to gain it back, and to lose even more weight.”

This conversation is not new to me. Oftentimes, when I am introduced to someone and they ask what I do for a living, they move right into telling me how they eat, what they eat, what they don’t eat and the different diets they’ve tried.

I don’t want to be rude, but I am really done with having every social conversation revolve around diets do’s and don’ts.

Anyway, back to this woman. She was asking my advice on some lunch ideas because she’s getting tired of salad and tuna (can you relate?). I suggested a sandwich of some kind, using whole wheat pita bread, tortilla or a really nice stone ground bread. Her reaction?

“Oh, no I don’t eat bread. I’m afraid of bread. I don’t want to regain the weight.”

I really felt sorry for her. And if this is your reaction too, I am so sorry. No one should be afraid of any food. Here’s what I shared with her , and what I’m sharing with you…

No one food has the power to make you fat or skinny!

That’s right, diet culture has caused you to believe that if you eat bread, you will gain weight and that is absolutely false! Whole grain breads are rich in nutrients such as thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, folate, iron, magnesium and dietary fiber to name a few. You will not gain weight by eating any one singular food. When you incorporate bread into an overall healthy well-balanced eating regimen, you will provide your body with the nutrients you need for good health.

What does this look like in real life?

Perhaps that means having whole grain toast with scrambled eggs for breakfast, a stuffed whole wheat pita with chicken and avocado for lunch and a whole grain Quesadilla filled with beans and veggies for dinner.

Diets are not sustainable for life. Avoiding bread for life is not a realistic expectation for most people. I know, you don’t even want to avoid bread. You do enjoy it, but the fear holds you back.

Making Peace with Bread

The first step to making peace with bread is to eat bread. So, decide when and how you want to reintroduce bread into your eating life. Then sit down and mindfully enjoy, savoring the taste and texture of your meal.

Then do it again the next day, and the day after that. You will see that nothing changed, you didn’t miraculously gain 5 pounds over night.

The more you expose yourself to bread, eating it mindfully and will full attention, the less fear you will have over it.

Bon Appetit! Let me know what types of bread are your favorite.

And if you need help making peace with other foods, just head on over to www.TalkWithBonnie.com and schedule a complementary call.

Can You Fail at Intuitive Eating?

The short answer is no! You cannot fail at intuitive eating. But let’s dig into this topic a bit because the idea of failure is top of mind for chronic dieters.

 

You’ve been down this road before. You want to lose weight so the only way you know how to do that is to go on a diet. You’re going along fine, eating what the diet tells you to, not eating what you “shouldn’t” and you start to feel lighter on your feet. Your clothes are fitting better and you are on a high.

 

Until you aren’t anymore.

 

What happened?

 

Well, you had a bad day at work, you lost a client, your boss yelled at you, you got a ticket driving home, and you had a fight with your partner. You walk in the house and you are in a really foul mood. You head straight to the kitchen and open the fridge to grab that chocolate cake you knew was in there, leftover from the party the other night. You dig in, and you tune out.

 

When you come out of your chocolate cake coma, you are really upset with yourself. You just blew your diet. Now you feel frustrated, angry with yourself, and the negative self-talk begins: “There you go again, screwing it all up”, “You can never stay on a diet, why do you even try”, “You are such a failure”.

 

The above is just one scenario where your desire to be “thin” led you to a diet which led you to feeling like a failure. What are some other scenarios?

 

2 Other Scenarios that Lead to Feelings of Failure

 

  1. Scenario #1: You want to lose weight and be “thin”. You go on a diet, restricting and depriving yourself of your favorite foods. At some point, you can’t stand the deprivation anymore…you must have “just a little” chocolate. You eat a piece, then another, and then another. Now, it’s an all out binge, as you vow to start again tomorrow. What happened here is that the restriction led to cravings which led to bingeing. Now, you feel miserable again and you have a deep desire to lose weight, again. You start the cycle all over> diet>restriction>deprivation>cravings>rebound eating>binge eating. And the feeling you have = FAILURE.

 

  1. Scenario #2: It’s the holiday season, and you’ve dieted your way into that little black dress. You are going to kill it at the holiday parties and family get-togethers. You can’t wait to hear all the compliments about your weight loss and how great you look. But wow, you are surrounded by all these goodies that you haven’t eaten for so long. You tell yourself you are not going to eat anything you “shouldn’t”. But then the inevitable happens. You aren’t paying attention, there’s a little too much alcohol and before you know it, you’ve dipped into the appetizers and pastries. At this point you tell yourself “I deserve it, I’m going to enjoy the holidays and not worry about the food. I’ll get back on my diet on January 1st.” And on January 1st, you wake up and feel miserable . You’ve regained much of the weight you lost, that little black dress doesn’t fit so well anymore, and you feel like a FAILURE.

 

What do you do? See scenario #1 above.

 

A Better Option than Dieting

 

I have another option for you where you will NEVER feel like a failure. And that option is > Intuitive Eating.

 

Intuitive eating is eating based on your physiological need to eat, based on your hunger and fullness signals, and NOT based on situations you are in or emotions you are feeling.

 

Intuitive eating is returning to eating the way you were born.

 

Now, just because you were born an intuitive eater, does not mean the journey back to it is an easy one if you’ve been dieting for years. You see, while as a baby you didn’t give much thought to eating, it was something you just knew (i.e. hunger pangs, cry for food; full belly, push away), as a dieting adult, you haven’t been listening to these signals. You’ve been relying on outside influences to guide your eating.

 

One of the biggest challenges I see with women who are learning to return to being intuitive eaters is TRUST. They are afraid to trust that their bodies will guide them correctly.

 

Is this you too?

 

I get it! You have lost trust in your body and in yourself to make your own food decisions because of all the “failures” from dieting (see scenarios above).

 

So, it’s of utmost importance that you understand that there is no pass or fail in intuitive eating.

 

Read and internalize this next sentence – I cannot fail at intuitive eating!

 

One of the biggest objections I hear from women who hesitate to commit to working on their relationship with food through intuitive eating is that they are afraid to fail again. That they’ve done it all and failed, so why should this work.

 

The reason? You have not tried this before. And if you have and you hit some roadblocks, then it’s more than likely that the diet mentality is still lingering. This is NOT FAILURE. This is part of the process.

 

A New Year Decision

 

Take this moment to commit to your intuitive eating journey. Repeat over and over “I cannot fail at intuitive eating” so a new neural pathway forms. Let this next year be the year where you leave dieting and all the negativity that comes with it behind.

 

I am taking new clients now for 2019. If you’d like to speak with me to see if we are a right fit for working together, just click here.

 

Revealing Your Dirty Little Secret…Night Time Bingeing

You’ve worked really hard to get the amazing body you have now. You’ve been on diet after diet but this last one was THE one. You lost the weight you wanted to, but to do that you eliminated lots of foods that you love.

 

You know what I mean. Bread. Simple good old-fashioned bread. The kind you make a sandwich with.

 

Sandwich you say? Oh, you haven’t eaten a sandwich in years. As a matter of fact, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re probably afraid of eating a sandwich. If you eat a sandwich, your inner critic starts screaming at you that you’ll gain the weight back, you’ll get fat again, and tomorrow you’ll wake up with an additional 3 pounds on your body. Bread is bad!

 

Does this inner critic voice sound familiar to you?

 

To quite the voice, you stick to the rules you followed that helped you lose the weight. No bread. No pasta. No cookies, No ice cream. No carbs!

 

People admire your body, tell you how great you look, how good you are when they see you eating your salad for lunch. But when you get home after a long hard day at work, what happens?

 

Fatigue, hunger, deprivation all set in and you have just one cookie. But that leads to feeling guilt and shame, and then another cookie. Then you feel even more guilt, shame and alone, and that leads to finishing the cookies and binge eating for the next few minutes, hours or even the rest of the evening.

 

But no one knows, except you! It’s a secret you are hiding from the world. You look perfect, you act perfect, and you eat perfect. Who would know that your dirty little secret is that you binge eat at night all the foods you don’t allow yourself to eat during the day.

 

How can you get out of this binge eating trap?

 

3 Steps to Stop Binge Eating

 

  1. Stop restriction yourself and allow all foods into your life again. I know this is so scary! But it’s important if you are ever going to have peace with food and your body.

 

  1. Be aware when you are binge eating. Don’t numb out like you usually do. Stay present, experience it and you will find that you will stop eating before the cookie package is finished.

 

  1. Breathe through it! Yes, identify the emotions you are feeling and breathe through it. Once you know what the true underlying feeling is, you can address it without food.

 

You are not alone. There are others who are experiencing exactly what you are! Seek out the support you need to beat binge eating. You don’t need to fly solo.

 

There’s a community of women ready to welcome you who understand what you are going through. Click HERE to get the support you need.

 

 

 

 

I’m Eating Unconditionally but Going Overboard on Sweets. Help!

This week’s Intuitive Eating Wednesday Question comes from a woman in my Diet Free Radiant Me intuitive eating support community.

The question is:

Question:

“When I give myself unconditional permission to eat the foods I want, all I eat are carbs and sweets, and I eat too many of them!! I’m worried that if I eat intuitively, I will only eat carbs and I will gain weight.”

 

I understand this concern, because I hear it from many people, both clients who are just starting the intuitive eating journey and those in my private intuitive eating support group who are contemplating the journey (If you are not yet a part of our group, join HERE for free).

 

It makes sense. You’ve been restricting carbs and sweets for years, maybe even decades (except when you are bingeing). Your mind has been programmed to think that carbs and sweets are “bad” for you and that you are a “bad” person if you eat them. So, in an effort to be “good”, you restrict them to the best of your ability. Until you can’t resist any longer and you make a deal with yourself – “I’ll only have one”, which leads to many or the whole box. Then you promise to NEVER eat them again.

 

So when the idea of intuitive eating was presented to you with the concept of “give yourself unconditional permission to eat what you desire when you are hungry”, this sounded too good to be true. But who are you to argue. You jump right in. And now you find yourself all the way at the other extreme of ‘carb land’ eating and eating and eating with a fear that you will now gain weight.

 

There are 3 points I’d like to make here to help you be at peace with ‘unconditional permission to eat”.

1. Whenever you restrict something all the way in one direction (i.e. chocolate) and then you release that restriction, it is going to boomerang all the way to the other direction. This means if you’ve restricted chocolate or pizza and haven’t had it in years, and now you release that restriction and allow yourself to eat it, you are likely going to eat a lot of it because you haven’t had it in so long. It’s like a pendulum, when pulled in one direction and then you let it go, it swings all the way to the opposite end.

 

Or, like a seesaw (did you play on a seesaw when you were a kid? I did!). Visualize restriction and deprivation at the highest point (that’s you sitting on the seesaw up in the air!). Then you let the restriction go all at once, bam, the seesaw hits the ground (and your bottom took a big hit!)

 

This is absolutely ‘normal’. This won’t last forever. You will return to a middle ground after a while. At some point you will say to yourself “okay, tastes nice but I don’t feel the need to have it every day anymore. I can have it any time I desire.”

 

2. Part of becoming attuned to your inner body wisdom means being mindful of how you feel while eating and after eating certain foods. So pay attention to how you feel when you are eating an overabundance of sweets. Do you feel energized, sluggish, low energy, tired? Do you have indigestion, bloat etc. You will find that after a while your body will tell you what it wants, and often that is lighter foods because it makes you feel so much better.

 

3. When you allow all foods into your world again, you will begin to identify your true food preferences. You may think you cannot live without those chocolate kisses, but now that you aren’t restricting them, you find that they taste like cheap chocolate. If you are going to eat chocolate, you want the expensive Godiva chocolate (I have a story about this which I’ll save for another time!)

 

This all might sound logical to you, right? So, why are you still scared?

 

Here are several reasons, along with solutions.

 

The solutions include the freebie gift downloads I’ve created for you over the last 3 weeks of Intuitive Eating Wednesdays.

 

1. Intellectually you understand all this. But your inner voices are still shouting diet food rules at you. This is because you still possess a diet mentality and wonder if willpower will help you eat the sweets ‘in moderation’.

 

Solution: There is no willpower required in intuitive eating. Download Your 3 Step Plan to Shift Out of Diet Mentality and the Willpower Trap here.

 

2. It’s not about the food at all. It’s about the WHY you are eating.

 

Solution: Learn what emotions are driving your eating and download the Emotional Eating Inventory Worksheet here.

 

3. You are still labeling food as “good” and “bad”, “healthy” and “unhealthy”.

 

Solution: Reprogram your ‘good food/bad food’ mindset and download the Fleshing Out Your ‘Good Foods/Bad Foods’ Worksheet here.

 

Let’s discuss this further on today’s Facebook LIVE at 5:30 pm EST on my Facebook business page HERE. Go ahead and LIKE the page now so you get notification when I go live.

 

Want to talk? Just go to http://TalkWithBonnie.com, answer a few short questions and we will set up a time to chat.