Why Dieting Fuels Binge Eating and Bulimia
Did you know that dieting actually increases your risk of gaining even more weight in the long run? There are incredibly smart biological systems that trigger a rebound weight gain as a result of dieting. Your body can’t distinguish the difference between restriction for weight loss and a genuine famine or lack of food supply. In order to protect you and keep you alive, your clever body triggers a cascade of hormonal responses that make you more hungry and preoccupied with food - as well as decrease your metabolism to conserve energy. With each diet, your body adapts and learns how to survive, making it more difficult to lose weight. Your metabolism doesn’t quite recover back to it’s baseline, which means you are starting a few steps back each time, making it even harder to lose weight! No wonder the diet industry is making a killing - it’s literally setting you up to fail and to come back for more! This is basically the perfect storm for disordered eating, severe dietary restriction, binge eating, poor self-esteem, negative body image and body dissatisfaction.
Dieting is also one of the biggest barriers to intuitive eating. When you are engaged in a dieting mentality, your eating decisions are heavily dictated by rules and one-size-fits-all eating plans, regardless of your food preferences, energy needs, hunger and satiety cues and cravings. All of this can trigger feelings of emotional and physical deprivation, which has been shown by multiple studies to lead to binge eating.
Why diets don’t work - theories of what maintains the binge-eating cycle
There has been extensive research done on why dieting does not work for long-term sustainable weight loss and is one of the main reasons why people struggle with binge eating and emotional eating. In summary, the more effort you put into suppressing your natural desire to eat all foods, the more pressure you’ll feel to binge. Anytime you are deprived of something you like, you long for it even more. This is called the deprivation effect and the effect is profound for dieters. Dietary restraint theories describes what happens when dieters go off their diet or break their food rules, which is inevitable. Below are some common and well-researched theories that I talk about with my clients:
The “What-the-Hell” effect - this is comparable to the “all-or-nothing” and “black and white” cognitive styles, where dieters tend to evaluate their success based on their food intake for that day. Even the thought of breaking a food rule can be enough to trigger this effect and the onset of a binge. The trouble is, strict diets are not sustainable, so we will inevitably break the rules.
Anticipation of Food Restriction - research has shown that when people go on a diet and know that a certain food or food group is going to be restricted, they will eat more of that food just before they start the diet - as well as whenever they are triggered into a binge and after the diet. So in reality, they actually don’t eat up eating less of that food overall. You are better off allowing yourself to eat all foods and learn how to eat mindfully by listening to your body’s cues.
The Irony of Thought Suppression - if I tell you not to think about a pink elephant, what happens? You think of a pink elephant! The irony of suppression thoughts about food is that you will think about food more. Imagine holding down a ball under water all day (your thoughts). By the end of the day, your arms will get pretty tired so you let go - and the ball erupts up out of the water, stronger than if you just let them sit there on the surface without struggling with them. This is what happens with the thoughts that you’ve been suppressing all day - they come back stronger at the end of the day when all things are quiet or when you are tired and weary. This may lead to a binge episode and emotional eating.
The Forbidden-Fruit Phenomenon - research shows that when parents restrict certain foods from their child, it creates a rebound effect, meaning that the child will eat the forbidden food more and become more disconnected with their body (i.e. stop eating when they are full). This leads to eating in the absence of hunger and overeating and in adults, it leads to an increased risk of emotional eating. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that it applies to any food group, whether it is forbidding fruit or sweets.
Emotional Regulation Skills - one well-researched theory is that individuals with binge eating disorder or bulimia have underdeveloped emotional regulation skills and they frequently rely on binge eating and purging to control or regulate their emotions. Overtime, it becomes an over-learned behaviour, which also crowds the ability to learn or practice other more adaptive and effective strategies.
Psychological Reactance - psychological reactance is the tendency for people to react against outside control of their behaviour; a reaction to any unsolicited influence that feels like a limitation to one’s freedom. The idea is that dieters feel the pressure to conform to societal standards of thinness and therefore follow strict dietary rules. This may seem fine for some time, until the balance between control VS autonomy becomes too overwhelming (favouring the control side), and the individual rebels by breaking all the dietary rules and binge eat. It is a way to take back control, even though a binge episode feels out of control; but the temporary relief and feeling of autonomy and power is strong enough to reinforce the behaviour, despite knowing that you will feel worse later. In other words, binge eating is a way to actively express that you still have autonomy to make your own choices - even if they are bad ones.
Do I need help?
If you identified with any of the theories of what maintains the binge-eating cycle but are still uncertain if you need help, you can take this questionnaire to help you figure out what your next steps might be. Alternatively, reach out to us by dropping us a quick message here and we will get back to you pronto!
