In my experience, most people who come to intuitive eating do so after realizing that restricting the foods they love in the name of weight loss just leads to binging, emotional eating, and impulsive eating. Over time (and usually many, many failed diets), they start to recognize that maybe the problem isn’t them, and may actually be the dieting itself. They’re not in fact uncontrollable eating machines, but rather suffering from the predictable effects of dieting and deprivation.
Intuitive eating and other non-diet approaches teach that physical restriction, or the deprivation of specific foods, food groups, or adequate nutrition, fuels a powerful drive to eat, a drive that can only be contained for so long. If someone can contain that drive to eat for an extended period of time, it’s almost never without significant physical and mental health consequences – ya know, the symptoms of an eating disorder.
However, aside from physical restriction, there’s another kind of restriction that can damage your relationship with food, and make eating much more stressful than it needs to be. It’s called mental restriction, which I sometimes refer to as emotional restriction. While mental restriction is much less talked about, it can be just as harmful as physical restriction, and is often something people struggle with well into their healing journey.
What is Mental Restriction?
Mental restriction is a type of restriction that occurs when one isn’t physically refraining from eating a food, but are telling themselves they shouldn’t be eating something, or mentally setting conditions for it. While you might be physically allowing yourself to eat the “bad” food or a more adequate amount, emotionally, it still feels like you’re doing something wrong. The stress and shame that’s created by mental restriction interferes with your ability to have a peaceful relationship with food, and to confidently feed yourself.
With mental restriction, you may have stoped dieting, but your brain hasn’t!
Mental restriction shows up in thoughts and emotions around food and eating rather than behaviors. Here’s some examples of mental restriction:
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“I can’t believe I ate that. I should have eaten something healthier”
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“I’ll let myself eat this today, but I’ll be better tomorrow.”
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“If I didn’t let myself eat desserts every day, my body wouldn’t be so gross.”
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“It’s OK that I’m eating this as long as I make it to my workout class tomorrow morning.”
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“It’s fine that I’m eating this today, but I probably shouldn’t eat it again this week.”
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“I should be able to ignore my growling stomach and make it until dinner. What’s wrong with me for needing a snack?”
For some, mental restriction may not show up in specific or coherent thoughts, but rather intense feelings of anxiety or shame when eating certain foods.
Why is mental restriction harmful?
Mental restriction creates a sense of insecurity that certain foods or adequate amounts of food will always be available. Even if you’re (conditionally) allowing yourself to eat all the foods, your brain doesn’t believe that will always be the case. Essentially, mental restriction says sure, you can have the cookie today, but they might not be there tomorrow.
Here are some of the impacts of mental restriction:
It interferes with your ability to eat with attunement/eat intuitively.
Mental restriction is diet mentality. It creates stress and anxiety that interferes with your ability to listen to your body cues, and creates mental noise that drowns out helpful thoughts about food and eating.
Mental restriction can lead to overeating, binge eating and impulsive eating.
Because mental restriction creates a sense that a food might not always be available, it keeps you trapped in “last supper” mode.
It’s stressful.
Constantly worrying about what you should eat, already ate, or how to earn or compensate for what you want to eat is STRESSFUL! Independent of any impacts on eating behaviors, stress impacts your health by raising cortisol and other stress hormones and messing with digestion.
It takes up valuable headspace.
Mental restriction is exhausting. It uses your valuable headspace to try and solve an unsolvable puzzle of how you can give yourself juuuust enough permission around food to stay in control. There may be, like, five people on this planet who have solved that equation. But as I like to remind my clients with an extremely dated reference, you are not Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. You can spend all your waking hours trying to figure out a way of eating that addresses all of your anxieties and concerns (weight! health! finances! time!), but does that honestly seem like something you want to put all your energy towards?
Mental Restriction vs. Gentle Nutrition
Some of you might be reading this and wondering what’s the difference between mental restriction and trying to eat healthy. The fact that the mainstream image of “healthy” eating is quite restrictive adds to that confusion.
To me, I think the difference between mental restriction and gentle nutrition is how it makes you feel, and what’s motivating it. Mental restriction is rooted in fear, control, and shame. Gentle nutrition is rooted in nourishment, nurturing, and doesn’t create a sense of deprivation the way mental restriction does. It’s not wrong or anti-intuitive eating to give yourself flexible boundaries around food if doing so helps you feed yourself more confidently. However, if those flexible boundaries make eating feel more stressful, then it’s likely mental restriction. To learn more, here’s a blog post I wrote on distinguishing food police from nutrition ally that may be helpful.
How to overcome mental restriction
Here are some tools to help overcome mental restriction so you can give yourself full permission with food:
Notice and name mental restriction – nonjudgementally!
The first step to overcoming mental restriction is recognizing when you’re engaging with it. I find a tool called cognitive defusion from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to be particularly helpful here. Instead of getting wrapped up in your thoughts and the emotions they create, simply notice and name the thought. Something as simple as saying to yourself, “I’m noticing I’m having a thought that I shouldn’t be eating this food” can be enough to get a bit of separation from it. To learn more about cognitive defusion, here’s a helpful blog post.
Unlearning
There is SO much misinformation out there about food and nutrition. If I really thought that eating desserts was going to cause some horrible health consequence, I would feel pretty anxious around them too! When we work with clients, we spend quite a bit of time helping them unlearn and reframe the inaccurate, overblown, and overly rigid information they’ve learned about food and nutrition through diet culture and replace that with gentle, flexible, and most importantly, evidence-based nutrition information.
Challenge and reframe
Once you’ve learned more accurate and helpful information about food and nutrition, you can challenge and reframe mental restriction. Here’s a helpful blog post I wrote about challenging diet mentality and mental restriction, with plenty of examples. Try not to approach challenging and reframing as getting into an internal debate with the food police, but rather responding to those thoughts compassionately, yet firmly. That said, with challenging and reframing, it’s pretty easy to get into an internal back-and-forth, which is why the next tool is important…
Move forward with values based eating
Thoughts are just thoughts. You are in control of your actions, and no matter the chaos in your brain, you can still choose to feed yourself in a way that aligns with your values and goals. Obviously, it’s not quite as simple as that – when your brain is screaming a million different thoughts at you, it’s hard to make decisions about what and how much to eat! But it’s not impossible. While your brain might be going haywire for eating a certain food, if you continue to challenge physical restriction by giving yourself permission to eat foods you enjoy and eat enough food to feel satisfied, over time that will chip away at mental restriction.
Want a simple tool for making values based food decisions? Here’s a blog post I wrote with one question you can ask yourself before food decisions to help eat more intuitively.
Need more support in letting go of mental restriction?
Overcoming mental restriction is one of the most challenging parts of building a healthier relationship with food. It is one of those things that can make eating feel chaotic and stressful, even when you’re far along in your healing process. If you would like individualized support, we work with clients throughout the US and in our Columbia, SC office providing nutrition counseling for disordered eating and intuitive eating coaching. Click here to learn more about our practice philosophy and services, and just reach out if you’d like more information.
